Tag: Scripture

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The Word Opens God to Abuse

In spite of this glorious fulfillment, God’s Word must always withstand opposition from His fallen creatures. Testing must precede validation. As in the life of Christ, humiliation always precedes glory, and trial always precedes vindication. Indeed, the reality of testing and opposition to God’s Word reveals the deep kenotic dimension to the act of revelation. Through His Word God not only reveals Himself, His will, and His purpose but is sacramentally present in it by the power of the Spirit (Mt 18:20; 28:20; Gal 3:2). God’s eternal Word, without losing its uncreated power and glory, kenotically makes itself available and tangible through the medium of finite human words. By making Himself known and tangible through His revelation in means, God opens Himself up to rejection, blasphemy, and abuse by His creatures.

Indeed, one suspects that this is the motivation behind Aquinas and Barth’s previously discussed theories of revelational analogy. If God makes Himself to be known in a merely analogical echo, then He does not fully open Himself up to the possibility of blasphemous abuse, misuse, or rejection of His Word. If God does not fully identify Himself with the means of grace, then He is saved from being rejected and abused when they are rejected and abused.

Aquinas and Barth’s revelational analogy is of course the logical corollary of their thoroughly Leonine view of the incarnation, wherein the communication idiomatum is little more than notional.[1] Nevertheless, as Luther notes, a God who does not communicate Himself fully to the flesh of Christ and suffer abuse is ultimately of no use to us.[2] And a God who has not communicated Himself fully to the external Word as both propositional truth and effective presence is of no use to His sinful creatures in need of “grace and truth” (Jn 1:14). If God is not fully present in His Word then He remains distant and hidden from His creatures, and they cannot grasp Him for the sake of their salvation. Just as the very Word of God made flesh submitted Himself to abuse and blasphemy on the cross and yet triumphed in the resurrection, in giving His external Word God submits Himself to abuse and opposition, and yet triumphs in either the creation of faith or the hardening of judgment.

[1] See my description in “Thomas Aquinas and Martin Chemnitz on the Hypostatic Union,” Lutheran Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2013): 1–32.

[2] Regarding Zwingli’s attempt to separate the two natures in Christ, Luther writes: “Beware, beware, I say, of this alloeosis, for it is the devil’s mask since it will finally construct a kind of Christ after whom I would not want to be a Christian, that is, a Christ who is and does no more in his passion and his life than any other ordinary saint. For if I believe that only the human nature suffered for me, then Christ would be a poor savior for me, in fact, he himself would need a Savior. In short, it is indescribable what the devil attempts with this alloeosis.” Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper, 1528 (AE 37:209–10; WA 26:319).

From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 67.

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Inerrancy and the Sacramental Nature of Scripture

By contrast, the confessional Lutheran commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture is based on the sacramental nature of Scripture. Just as the reality of grace in the sacraments is hidden in and under the physical elements and is recognizable only due to the word of promise attached to them, God’s Word in Scripture is recognizable as such because of the dominical promise of infallibility Christ has attached to the authors and their words. Hence, calling into question the inerrancy of the Bible also means calling into question the validity of the sacraments. If Christ’s promise remains good for the sacraments, then it should hold for the inerrancy of the Scriptures. Because Christ has risen from the dead, thereby validating all He has said and done, we must believe Him over our fallen and finite human reason. Indeed, as Luther aptly states in the Large Catechism regarding the promise of Christ: “Because we know that God does not lie. I and my neighbor and, in short, all men, may err and deceive, but the Word of God cannot err.”[1] If [Matthew] Becker wishes to accept the validity of the sacraments (as one suspects he does) but not the inerrancy of Scripture, then he must insist on arbitrarily rejecting one of Christ’s dominical promises while accepting the others.[2]

Finally, as observed earlier with regard to [Rudolf] Bultmann, the Gospel cannot be isolated from the scriptural worldview, narrative, and other dogmas of the faith. As we have shown repeatedly, while the Gospel is the central article (Hauptartikel) of the faith, it nevertheless does not exhaust the content of the Christian faith. Neither does the Gospel exist in isolation from other revealed truths. By analogy we may say that if the Scriptures are like a wheel, the Gospel is the axle and the other articles of the faith like the spokes. Although an axle is central to the functioning of a wheel, the wheel is in fact non-functional without the spokes.[3]

In the same manner, the Gospel is ultimately a solution to the problem of the sin committed originally by Adam and Eve and transmitted to their descendants. Adam and Eve could sin only because they were creatures who violated the Law of their creator God. Similarly, Christ’s atoning work would be incoherent without the doctrines of the Trinity or the incarnation or the background of the whole history of Israel. The difficulty with Becker wishing to make the Gospel the ultimate criterion of all theological authority is that the Gospel does not make sense without the context of the total witness of the Bible and hence its inerrant authority.[4] If I believe the Gospel as true unconditionally, then I must believe the whole Bible as unconditionally true.

[1] LC IV (Bente, 747).

[2] Reu makes a similar point. See Johann Michael Reu, Lutheran Dogmatics (Dubuque: Wartburg Theological Seminary, 1951), 459–60.

[3] This is a common analogy within many conservative Lutheran circles. Nevertheless, I thank the Rev. David Fleming for first alerting me to it.

[4] Becker, Fundamental Theology, 285.

From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 110-111.

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The Function and Proclamation of Holy Scriptures

The ultimate goal of the inspiration and writing of Holy Scripture is the oral proclamation of the Word within the life of the church. In turn, the ultimate purpose of the proclamation of the Word is to give Christ and His promise to creatures of faith. The written Scriptures, like sacraments, are nothing less than a delivery system for the truth and presence of the crucified and risen Christ (Mt 18:20; Lk 10:16; Jn 6:63; 2 Tm 3:15).[1] Robert Preus observes that such a view is in accordance with the teaching of the Lutheran scholastics, who understood Scripture “assumes its true significance only when viewed soteriologically, [that is] when considered as an operative factor in God’s plan of salvation.”[2]

Therefore, contrary to the assumptions of much of modern Protestantism (whether liberal or conservative), the Bible is not an abstract authority, properly understood by rational and autonomous human beings within the sphere of their own subjective solitude (2 Pt 1:20). It is not a compendium of abstract bits of heavenly information that can be picked apart and assembled in order to say virtually anything. Rather, Scripture’s proper purpose is to be proclaimed and understood in the midst of the church and its sacramental life of forgiveness. Consequently, the presence of the risen Christ and the forgiveness He offers in the midst of the church is the lodestar for any proper understanding of the purpose and meaning of Holy Scripture.

This fact comes into particular focus when one considers that before it was written down as Sacred Scripture, the Word of God was first transmitted orally within the assembly of Israel and the liturgical-sacramental life of the early church. Luther frequently observed that the Word of God was written down only so that it might be preserved and therefore orally proclaimed with greater certainty.[3] Even if one ignores the role that Holy Scripture possesses in the Word and Sacrament ministry of the church, it should be noted that in the ancient world all written texts were intended for oral performance insofar as reading was almost never done silently.[4] Therefore, as an ancient text, Scripture is by definition meant for oral proclamation.

Jesus authorized the apostles as His infallible witnesses (and therefore as the infallible authors of Scripture) simultaneous with His authorization of the Word and sacraments of the church (Mt 28:19–20; Lk 10:16; Jn 16:13; Acts 1:8). This correspondence suggests that the authority of Holy Scripture and the authoritative ministry of the church are not separable but function properly only when understood in the light of one another. Some might object that the commissions cited above are authorizations merely of the preaching of the Word, not of the writing of the New Testament itself.[5] This is an incorrect interpretation for a number of reasons.

[1] Johann Baier, Compendium Theologiae Positivae, ed. C. F. W. Walther, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Emmanuel Press, 2005–2006), 1:117–18; Gerhard, On the Nature of Theology and Scripture, 333.

[2] Preus, Inspiration of Scripture, 170; cited from Webster, Holy Scripture, 40.

[3] First Sunday in Advent (WA 10/1:2.48). “The church is a mouth-house, not a pen-house.” Cited from Mark Thompson, A Sure Ground on Which to Stand: The Relation of Authority and Interpretive Method of Luther’s Approach to Scripture (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 2004), 75.

[4] Ben Witherington III, New Testament Rhetoric: An Introductory Guide to the Art of Persuasion in and of the New Testament (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), 1–2, 90.

[5] Robert Bellarmine and many early modern Roman Catholic apologists made this argument. See Gerhard, On the Nature of Theology, 51–58. See a modern objection along the same lines in James Barr, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, and Criticism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983), 12.

From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 89-90.