Tag: Sacraments

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The Pattern of Flight from Condemnation to Grace

God’s wrath is revealed to all outside the garden (that is, outside the sphere of divine grace and promise) through his creaturely masks. Indeed, God’s “invisible attributes [i.e., including his holiness and wrath], namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20, Emphasis added).[1] 

Nevertheless, God established a new word of promise in the form of the protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15.  The grace of the protoevangelium took on an even more definite form in the corporate life and history of Israel through the promise God attached to Abraham’s “seed” (Gen. 22:18).  This effective Word of promise pushed the history of Israel inexorably along to its fulfillment in the person of the Messiah, even in the face of human opposition.  Nevertheless, the movement of the divine Word toward its final fulfillment could often appear as a failure even as it succeeded.  When Moses pronounced the divine Word “Let my people go,” it appeared ineffective to both the Egyptians and Israelites.  Indeed, Pharaoh was apparently unmoved by the pronouncement of the divine deed-word and, in turn, increased Israel’s labor (Exod. 5).  Nevertheless, it was through Pharaoh’s very obstinacy that God worked his redemption and was finally able to bring a plague so horrific that Egypt expelled Israel.[2]  God likewise told Isaiah to speak a word of repentance to Israel that they would ignore, thereby ensuring their suffering in Babylon (Isa. 6:9-13).  But Israel’s destruction was be the occasion for their true repentance, something that would prepare them for the grace of restoration and the coming of the Messiah (Isa. 40).  Finally, God’s Word of redemption found ultimate fulfillment in the opposition and murder of Jesus by his opponents.  By killing God himself, Jesus’ enemies brought about the fulfillment of the very Word of God that they sought to thwart.  As Luther’s theology of the cross shows, God works under the form of his opposite.  

God fulfills his Word under the outward appearance of it having failed.

Likewise, throughout the history of Israel, God’s pattern of attaching his dual words of condemnation and grace to created masks continued.  By doing so, the Lord bid his covenant people to flee from the word of condemnation to that of grace.  Although Jacob is attacked by God in the night, he demands the name of the shadowy attacker and thereby hearkened back to the promise of blessing that God had made to him at Bethel (Gen. 32:22-32).[3]  Moses is also attacked by God on his return to Egypt but flees to the promise of grace found in circumcision of his son (Exod. 4:24-26).[4]  God threatened with death those who came near Mt. Sinai, the mountain where he gave his law (Exod. 19:10-13), but promised forgiveness and a share in his personal holiness to those who approached him through the sacramental channels of the Tabernacle/Temple at Mt. Zion.[5] 

This pattern of fleeing from condemnation to grace also continued in the life of Christ.  In the crucifixion, God designated Jesus and the sacraments of the New Testament, which flowed from his side (Jn. 19:34) on the hillock of Golgotha, as the new place of grace. Likewise, he designated the Temple mount and works connected with it as a place of condemnation (Gal. 4:25-6).  In his resurrection, Jesus insisted that the women flee his tomb (the place of death and condemnation) and instructed them to tell his disciples to meet him in Galilee.  In Galilee, Jesus told the disciples look for him now not in the tomb, but in the word and sacrament ministry of the Church (Mt. 28:8-10, v. 16-20).

[1] Steven Paulson, Lutheran Theology (New York: T & T Clark International, 2011), 70-4.

[2] Steven Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hiddenness, Evil, and Predestination, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018), 229-43

[3] LW 6:122-55.

[4] Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hiddenness, Evil, and Predestination, vol. 1, 17-8.

[5] See good description in: John Kleinig, Leviticus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2003).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

Image: Gustave Doré, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1855.

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Luther on Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist

Although Luther affirmed the substantial presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, he disliked the doctrine of transubstantiation 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.[1]  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.[2] 

In spite of this criticism of transubstantiation, it is interesting to note that Luther does not consider belief in the doctrine to be tremendously problematic and allows that people could still affirm transubstantiation as a theologoumenon.[3]  What is most important to the Reformer is that one affirms the substantial presence of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Lord’s Supper.  Although how one conceptually achieves this mysteriously physical presence is not unimportant, the main point for Luther is that one knows that Christ is substantially present in his body and blood “for you” (pro me).[4] 

This is why Luther was considerably less tolerant when it comes to the sacramental symbolicism of a figure like Zwingli.[5]  From Luther’s perspective, Zwingli ignores the divine promise that Christ’s flesh and blood will be present on essentially rationalistic grounds, namely, that physical bodies cannot be at more than one location at once.  As we have seen Luther rejects this logic and affirms that Jesus’ body remains a real body. However, it participates in God’s glory and can transcended the normal boundaries of physicality.[6]  After all, in the resurrection Jesus was able to walk through walls and appear and disappear at will.  Jesus’ body nevertheless remained a real body.  Christ could still invite Thomas to place his fingers in the nail holes of his very real hands and eat fish with the apostles.  Likewise, the mysterious supernatural quality of Christ’s body in the Lord’s Supper does not negate its real physicality or his genuine humanity. 

As we noted earlier, these differences between Luther and Zwingli on the sacrament are due in part to competing concepts of the communicatio idiomatum.[7]  Nevertheless, these differences also have implications regarding the nature of how the Word of God functions.  For Zwingli, the words of institution are signifiers that merely signify.[8]  Zwingli resolves the puzzle of how the signifiers “body and blood” can be validly applied to the signified “bread and wine” (which they do not match) through sacramental symbolicism.[9]  For Luther, divine words are not mere signifiers, but promises that effect what they speak.[10] This is the same principle that we have seen earlier in his views of confession and absolution.  Hence the words “this is my body . . . this is my blood” possess divine power to bring about the presence of Christ’s flesh and blood.[11]  Faith must simply trusts that God’s words perform what they promise.  To believe otherwise would be to trust in human reason over the God’s clearly stated promises.[12]

[1] LW 36:33-4.

[2] LW 36:34-5.

[3] LW 36:35.

[4] Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 379.

[5] Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology, 169-77; Sasse, This is My Body, 134-294.

[6] Thomas Davis,  This Is My Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 41-64; Sasse, This is My Body, 148-60.

[7] Sasse, This is My Body, 148-54.

[8] See discussion in: Aaron Moldenhauer, “Analyzing the Verba Christi: Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and Gabriel Biel on the Power of Words,” in The Medieval Luther, ed. Christine Helmer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 53-6.

[9] Ulrich Zwingli, “On the Lord’s Supper,” in Zwingli and Bullinger, 175-238.

[10] Moldenhauer, “Analyzing the Verba Christi,” 57-61.

[11] LW 37:180-88.

[12] LW 37:131.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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Sex and the Sacraments

Because our bodily presence and trustworthiness are inexorably tied together in human experience, physicality represents a key manner in which humans inculcate fidelity.  Physical intimacy within marriage best exemplifies this truth and is especially relevant to our study in light of the biblical motif of YHWH/Christ as the bridegroom to the people of God (Jer. 31:32, Isa. 54:5, Hos. 2:7, Eph. 5).  Christians have always rejected pre-marital sex and adultery not only because of the destructive consequences of disease and heartache, but because giving one’s self physically over to one’s spouse is the ultimate pledge of one’s loyalty and fidelity.  To give one’s body to another is to give one’s very being.  If one gives their very physical being away haphazardly, either for the sake of a pleasant weekend or in an affair, how can ultimate fidelity ever be established?[1]  If one gives away his very enfleshed self to anyone who strikes his fancy, nothing will be left over to give to one’s spouse as an ultimate pledge.  This is why the explanation that an act of infidelity was “just sex” is never convincing to the wronged partner. 

Therefore, bodily self-gift is a necessary means of giving assurance of fidelity to the absolute promise of Christ the bridegroom of the Church.  It is not sufficient to treat the sacraments as small, symbolic tokens of love in the manner of a husband who occasionally gives trinkets to his wife.[2]  Any relationship may be poorer without gestures like these small gifts, but a marriage is not a marriage in a biblical sense without fleshly consummation and unity (Gen. 2:24, Eph. 5:31).  Through fleshly self-giving one “knows” (yada) one’s spouse, that is, they gain a real participatory knowledge of their very physical being.  In the same manner, we can be no more certain of our justification and eternal life than to physically receive the very flesh and blood that was sacrificed for humanity on the cross (1 Cor. 11:26) and raised in anticipation of the general resurrection (Jn. 6:54).  There is no ambiguity as to whether or not one is justified by the work of Christ when Christ himself is present and gives believers that same body and blood that was sacrificed for them on the cross.  Just as baptism is a proleptic realization of the last judgment, so too paschal feast of the Lord’s Supper is the proleptic realization of the final bridal feast of the Lamb at the end of time (Rev. 19:6-9).

[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997-1999), 2:91-2.

[2] Carl Trueman’s analogy for the sacraments.  See: Carl Trueman, Grace Alone: Salvation as a Gift of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 213-4.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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Luther on the Return to Baptism and Justification

Through the perpetual return to baptism the Christian is able to enter the reality of Jesus’ death and resurrection, although this event is historically distant.  Thus, a key implication of Luther and the historic Lutheran tradition’s teaching on communicatio idiomatum is that Christ’s humanity is not confined by time and therefore he can make himself available through the promise of the gospel in any era.  Herein we again encounter in Luther implicit appropriation of Scripture’s distinction between chronological time and kairological time.[1]  Even though Scripture does describe the history of salvation as an orderly development, there is a perichoresis of the ages.  God’s kairological time has manifested itself at specific points in chronological history.  Nevertheless, the Lord is not bound to the chronological order of history in manifesting his kairological salvation.  Hence, the risen Jesus who transcends time makes the eschaton present to the believer at the appointed time of his redemption in baptism in order to actualize God’s electing and justifying purposes.  Christ thereby makes it possible to incorporate the believer into eschatological redemption in the present through a return to the kairological event of his baptism, just as baptism is a return to the kairological event of his death and resurrection. 

As Oswald Bayer observes: “Luther’s apocalyptic understanding of creation and history opposes modern concepts of progress.  For Luther, the only progress is return to one’s baptism, the biographical point of rupture between the old and new worlds. Creation, Fall, redemption, and completion of the world are not sequential advance, one after the other, but perceived in an intertwining of the times.”[2]

In emphasizing the possibility of returning to one’s baptism, Luther responds to the issues that gave rise to the problem of post-baptism sin. This problem in turn generated the Latin doctrines of penance, purgatory, and indulgences which he combated in his early Reformation theology.  Like the New Testament and the ante-Nicene Church,[3] Luther saw baptism as the apocalyptic rupture between the old person and new person in Christ.[4]

[1] Elert, The Christian Ethos, 286-9; Paul Tillich, The Interpretation of History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936).

[2] Oswald Bayer, “Martin Luther,” in The Reformation Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Early Modern Period, ed. Carter Lindberg (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 51-2.

[3] See: Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009).

[4] Trigg, Baptism in the Theology of Martin Luther, 92-8.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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Enthusiasm and the External Word

Due to the simul of Christian existence (that is, Christians are “at the same time saint and sinner,” simul justus et peccator),[1] the temptation of returning to the self-incurvature of reflective faith is ever present.  That is to say, because even true believers now possess a sinful nature, they are subject to the temptation trusting in their own works or the quality of their faith over what the external Word tells them.  Such a temptation connects with not only the root sin of unbelief, but what Luther called “Enthusiasm.”[2]  Enthusiasm means “God withinism.”[3]  An enthusiast looks inward to his interior thoughts and feeling so as to discover God’s will for him, rather than the external Word of God.  This tendency can undermine biblical authority, but it is also the source of human doubt in the promise of the gospel. 

Because of fallen humanity’s orientation toward unbelief and enthusiasm (incurvatus in se) temptation to doubt one’s own proper reception of the word will invariably arise.  When temptation arises, faith in the Word must inevitably seek a secondary support in refocusing the believer on the objectivity of grace rather than the subjectivity of their own disposition.  Such a secondary support should inculcate the objectivity of grace to the individual believer in a tangible manner and break the focus of the believer on their own inner reception of the external word.  This secondary support for faith can be found in the sacraments of the new testament. 

Disappointingly, most forms of Protestantism have failed to maintain the focus believer on Christ and the Word because of their rejection of sacramental realism.  Indeed, most (though not all) Protestants rejected sacramental realism in favor of sacramental symbolicism or spiritualism.[4]  Since both sacramental symbolicism and spiritualism disconnect the res from the signum in the sacraments, much of the Protestant tradition has denied believers the tangible secondary assurance of God’s grace that sacramental realism provides.  Believers who reject sacramental realism therefore have had to seek secondary assurance apart from the sacraments in moral athleticism or spiritual experience, thereby exacerbating the problem of unbelief and self-incurvature.  Only if the sacraments objectively contain grace can they function as antidote to religious subjectivism.  They perform this task by shifting the focus away from the interior and spiritual reception of grace, to grace’s tangible external embodiment in a physical medium. 

[1] See: Wilhelm Christe, Gerechte Sünder: eine Untersuchung zu Martin Luthers “Simul iustus et peccator” (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2014). 

[2] SA III.8; Concordia Triglotta, 497.

[3] Steven Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hidden in the Cross, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 350.

[4] See discussion in: James F. White, The Sacraments in Protestant Practice and Faith (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).