Tag: Scripture

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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/.

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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.

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Homologoumena and Antilegomena

Historically, Lutherans have made a distinction within the canonical books of the New Testament between the homologoumena and antilegomena. As noted above, the distinction refers to the division between the books of the New Testament that were affirmed unanimously by the witness of the early church as being written by the apostles, and those that were not thus affirmed. Among the first class (homologoumena) are reckoned the Gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters, 1 Peter, and 1 John. Among the second class (antilegomena) are reckoned Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation.1

It is important to recognize that for Lutherans the antilegomena does not relate to the undisputed books of the New Testament in the manner that the Apocrypha relates to the Old Testament proper. Whereas the Apocrypha is not considered the Word of God because it was not authorized as such by Christ, the antilegomena may be apostolic in origin, but that origin is disputed….

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Did the Apostles Establish the New Testament Canon?

At the core of the apostolic testimony found in the New Testament are the four Gospels. The Gospels are central to the apostolic testimony, not only because they give a direct witness to the reality of God’s salvation manifest in Jesus but also because, as Moses authorized subsequent prophecy in Israel in Deuteronomy, Jesus in the Gospels authorizes the infallibility of apostolic witness.

The Gospels were written by at least two apostles (John and Matthew) and two persons authorized by the apostles (Mark by Peter, Luke by Paul). They therefore bear the stamp of the risen Christ’s authority. Although liberal scholars have questioned the reliability of the four Gospels and their authorship, there are many good arguments in favor of both their reliability and their traditional authorship….

Overall this evidence suggests that there was an early, very strong, and geographically diffuse consensus in the early church that the four canonical Gospels were indeed Scripture and that they were handed down from the apostles….

Finally, beyond the external evidence of the traditional authorship, there is evidence within the Gospels themselves. Richard Bauckham has shown that the Gospels bear literary features that suggest the authors were themselves eyewitnesses or had access to eyewitness testimony….

As should be clear from this discussion, the claims to apostolic origins made by the New Testament documents are extremely credible and grounded in objective historical fact. From this it is assured that they possess the infallibility Christ promised the apostolic witness and therefore legitimately belong to the canon. But it is also possible to go beyond the argument for mere apostolic authorship of each individual. Below we will argue that a case can be made that at least certain blocks of canonical materials, if not the whole canonical list itself, were recognized and authorized during the apostolic period. If valid, this argument would suggest that the canonical decisions of the fourth century were correct not simply because they accurately ascertained the apostolic source of each writing. Rather, their canonical lists grew organically out of the implied or explicit decisions the apostles themselves made about their own writings and their apostolic co-witnesses in the faith.

From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 160, 162, 165, 171-172.

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The Triune God, the Person of Christ, and Inerrancy

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s subject-object dualism, Scripture teaches that all reality is rooted in the triune God, who unites subjectivity and objectivity in His personal existence. On the one hand, God is omniscient and therefore possesses an absolutely objective knowledge of Himself and all His creatures. At the same time, God’s knowledge of Himself and His creation comes in and through His personal and subjective existence as eternally actualized in the persons of the Trinity. God therefore knows what He knows absolutely objectively, but from the analogical “perspective” of the individual persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Moreover, God’s knowledge, particularly of Himself, is relational in that it is actualized through the perichoretic mutual indwelling of the persons within one another. Although the persons of the Trinity know one another through mutual indwelling, they do not lose their personal and distinct subjectivity as persons.

Beyond the life of the Trinity, one can see the unity of objectivity and subjectivity in the incarnation. Here the universal and absolutely objective God takes into Himself a particular subjective human existence in time. Again, the subjective and objective are not antithetical to one another but perichoretically indwell one another through the communicatio idiomatum of the incarnation. Just as the persons of the Trinity perichoretically know and dwell in one another without abrogating their distinct personal realities, the two natures communicate their properties to one another without obliterating their distinctness as divine and human.

Therefore, the man Jesus participates in the fullness of divine glory (genus majestaticum, Col 2:9) and even the archetypal theology of God’s eternal self-knowledge (theologia archetypa, Col 2:3).[1] Likewise, in and through His unity with the human nature the person of the Son in His absolute objectivity and omniscience participates in the historical situatedness and particularity of the human nature. As a result of the communicatio idiomatum in Christ, creatures in their subjectivity, finitude, and historical situatedness are given access to the full objectivity of God’s reality and truth.

The form taken by Scripture as the inspired Word of God thus comes into focus. As we have already seen, in moving the scriptural authors to write, the Holy Spirit incorporated (one might say by enhypostasis) the individuality of each scriptural author and his particular situation in time and space into the composition of the divinely inspired books. In the incarnation the human nature of Christ possesses its own individual characteristics while at the same time lacking its own center of identity (anhypostasis). Rather, Christ’s humanity is incorporated into and possesses its center of identity in the eternal person of the Word (enhypostasis). By analogy, the individual characteristics of each scriptural author are not negated by the revelation of the Holy Scriptures but are incorporated into the act of inspiration and composition. Nevertheless, since the words of the Bible are the very words of God, the written words of the scriptural authors find their ultimate center of identity not in the personality, intentionality, and circumstances of the individual author but rather in the hypostasis of God’s revelation.

Hence, as a byproduct of God’s trinitarian and incarnational agency the Bible gives the Word of God in and through a variety of creaturely witnesses. Indeed, in the Bible there is a “cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1). Like the Trinity and the incarnation, Scripture witnesses to a single harmonious truth manifested in and through difference. The Bible is absolutely objective and inerrant. It witnesses to what genuinely occurred in time and space, but it does so from the perspective of the individual authors in their individual communities and historical situations, thus conveying to its readers a symphony or even a polyphony of truth.[2]

[1] Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics 1:252; Preus, Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism 1:170–72.

[2] See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth Is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987).

From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 143-145.