Scripture Archives - Jack Kilcrease

June 27, 2024June 27, 2024

The Pure and Clear Fountain of Israel: The Necessity of Inerrancy

Through providence and the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit, men collected God’s auditory words into the written word of the Bible. Contrary to common belief, pre-modern Christian orthodoxy consistently affirmed the inerrancy of the Bible as God’s Word.¹ Sadly, modern Fundamentalist trajectories in theology have distorted this doctrine. Their attempts to wield inerrancy as a weapon against post-Cartesian forms of philosophical Foundationalism have only degenerated orthodox teaching.²

A Sacramental Medium, not an Epistemic Foundation

Today, many conservative Evangelical and Fundamentalist theologians seem to hold that the Bible must provide its own indubitable “clear and distinct ideas”³ to build a foundation for further knowledge. From this perspective, the biblical “foundation” could counteract modern claims of autonomous knowledge. The Bible, however, is not primarily a tool of philosophers, but a channel of God’s creative, redemptive, and sanctifying Word.

It is, indeed, important to affirm the absolute truthfulness of God’s auditory/written words. However, there are better and worse ways to employ the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy. As noted, many modern conservative Christian theologians have conceptualized the doctrine of inerrancy in ways that largely reflect modernist and Foundationalist presuppositions.⁴ Rather, Christians must see the Word of God as a sacramental medium that facilitates both the creational and redemptive exchange between God and his creatures. God speaks and thereby activates the response of his creatures through his auditory words. As theologian Kevin Vanhoozer writes:

June 22, 2023June 22, 2023

Speaking on the Authority of Scripture in Wittenberg

I am excited to be speaking at the North European Luther Academy‘s 2023 Annual Theological Symposium in Wittenberg, Germany. This year’s symposium topic will be “Inspiration, Authority, and Leadership.” I will be speaking on the “The Authority of Scripture and Tradition in Light of the Lutheran Confessional Paradigm” and “The Doctrine of Scriptural Inerrancy in Confessional Lutheran Perspective.” Other speakers include Daniel Johansson, Knut Alfsvåg, Rune Imberg, and Fredrik Sidenvall. If you can make it, I’d love to connect!

May 10, 2022May 10, 2022

God’s Truth and Language Games

Although they are both ultimately problematic, Fundamentalism and right-wing Postmodernist theologies are more workable than theological Liberalism because they remain committed to the basic content of the Christian faith. The issue tends to be more how they seek to establish the validity of their epistemic judgments and less at the content of their judgments. Similarly, in the dialectic of antinomianism and legalism, legalism has the advantage of at least acknowledging the existence of the law. This is true even if legalists suffers from the same delusion as antinomians, namely that we can escape the condemnation of the law. Hence, it is not wrong to acknowledge the acceptance of a law of belief (fides quae creditor) as a necessary condition for possessing genuine Christian faith (fides qua creditor). Rather, what is problematic is to see the law and not the promise of grace is the foundation of the divine-human relationship, and therefore the starting point of all our truth claims.

Postmodernism is correct that there is no neutral starting point for our epistemic projects, even if we admit that the frameworks we employ are vulnerable to critique and falsification. Therefore, we begin with the explicitly biblical presupposition that humans are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26). Christians confess that the biblical God is always and eternally the Holy Trinity. God as Trinity is an eternal linguistic agent, who gracious gives of himself in speaking forth the Word and the spiration of the Spirit. Hence, the Christian God is an eternally gracious and responsive God. God gives and responds to himself within the eternal dialogue and self-communication of the divine life.

April 3, 2022April 1, 2022

Doing Theology: Part II

Read Part I Here

We should keep a number of relevant points in mind when examining how Luther construes the theological task. First, the cycle of oratio, meditatio, and tentatio recapitulations the Incarnation and work of Christ. Much as the Word was incarnate through the coming of the Spirit, so too divine truth becomes incarnate in the mind and proclamation of the theologian through the coming of the Word and the Spirit through oratio and meditatio.

In Christ’s incarnation, the Holy Spirit enhypostically incorporated a human nature derived from Mary into the pre-existent Word, so that He might operate in the created world. So too (at least in Johann Gerhard’s account) the Spirit incorporates the pre-existent knowledge of the theologian in the theological task. Finally, Christ’s communication of the Word was tested by his suffering and death, and validated by his resurrection. So too, the interpreter must undergo the testing of his interpretation and application of Scripture within the arena of the kingdom of the world.

The incarnational nature of the theological method of oratio, meditatio, and tentatio also shows how theology can be historically contextual and culturally responsive, while at the same time be faithfully ground in the unchanging Word of God. The theologian’s act of faithfully translating the Word of God into the contemporary idiom is brought about only by the work of the Spirit. The Spirit himself incorporates the knowledge and thought-forms available to the interpreter in his context. Since the Word of God as revelation is embedded in history and the created order, the theologian may seek to clarify the Word by drawing on multiple contextualized disciplines and sources of knowledge that will clarify its meaning.

March 31, 2022April 1, 2022

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).