Tag: Theology

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Prolegomena to Dogmatics

Chapter 1: Contexts and the Contextual Nature of Theology

Introduction: Historical Contingency and the Possibility of Truth

Christianity is a religion centered on salvific events in history.  Although it makes claims about an eternal God and his transcendent truth, at the same time it paradoxically finds its sources of knowledge about the eternal God in finitude and the contingency of history.  The historical embeddedness of Christianity not only pertains to the biblical revelation, but also to the subsequent task of Christian theology. 

Because Christian theology is embedded in the historical, it is also always contextual.  During the previous two centuries, New Testament scholars have made much of how the first documented Christian theologian, the Apostle Paul, expressed his theological vision in the form of occasional letters to his congregations.  This pattern continues in the rest of the history of Christian thought.  Starting with Ignatius of Antioch moving onto Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth, all theologians address a specific context even in their non-occasional writings.  In each generation, theologians must look to the Word of God, test the present proclamation of the Church against it, and apply God’s Word to the challenges that face the contemporary Christian community. 

The application of God’s Word to new contexts entails relating the content of revelation to the surrounding culture’s beliefs about the nature of reality.  Put another way, because Christian theology is an incarnational discourse embedded in the concrete world of history, culture, and experience, what the Bible says about the old and new creation, as well as the Lordship of Christ, cannot be hermeneutically sealed against the claims of the surrounding culture.  Rather, when theologians seek to apply the Word of God, they need to explicate and relate what the Bible teaches to what historically and culturally contextualized people see as the nature of reality.  This may take the form of pushing back against the claims of the wider culture.  It may also take form of translating the biblical worldview and the gospel into a new historical/cultural idiom.  Translation is essential to the task of theology, something which we will explore at greater length below.  Even when theologians use biblical revelation to critique the idolatries of the wider culture, the thought-forms they utilize to explain the Bible will invariably be borrowed from the culture they are pushing against.

The contingency and historical-contextual nature of theology raises a number of important questions, most notably, whether the historically embedded Word of God is capable of giving us access to universal and absolute truth.  In On the Proof of the Spirit and the Power (1777), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing questioned how Christian theology could ever make absolute truth-claims in light of its reliance on history with all its messiness and contingency….  Lessing complained that Christian theology asserted necessary truths on the authority of mere accidental truths (i.e., the events of salvation history), something which was by definition impossible.  Beyond this, according to Lessing, Christians had often made apologetic arguments in favor of revelation on the basis of miraculous historical events that could never be definitively proven and were subject to much doubt.

In the early twentieth century, Ernst Troeltsch made a similar critique in his work The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions (1901).  Following the scholarly trajectory of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule Troeltsch contends that all religion is a byproduct of the culture from which it grew. As a result, religions are historically contingent and cannot make claims to absoluteness….

Christian theology cannot dodge the problems presented by Lessing and Troeltsch either by exempting one’s own theology from historical contingency or by sinking into the radical relativism of one’s personal faith or that one’s individual community.  This is because from its inception, Christian theology has been an incarnational and eschatological discourse.  Christian theology, properly understood, therefore does not hide from claims regarding the absolute, whether this be the absolute God, or the absolute destiny of humans.  Neither does Christian theology deny its embeddedness in the finitude and contingency of history, either in the case of the biblical revelation, or the ongoing task of translating the Christian message into new historical and cultural idioms. 

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

Image from “What is a prolegomena?”, Got Questions?: Your Questions, Biblical Answers, https://www.gotquestions.org/prolegomena.html.

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Justification by the Word

Lexham Press will be publishing my newest book, Justification by the Word: Restoring Sola Fide, relatively soon. If interested, you can pre-order at Lexham’s website. Here’s a snippet from the introduction:

Book cover art from Lexham

According to [Phillip] Cary, this unreflective faith is possible for Luther because of his belief in the sacramentality of the word.1 Here Cary echoes the work of the German Luther scholar Oswald Bayer, who claims that it was in fact the sacramentality of the word, and not justification by faith, that was central to the so-called Reformation breakthrough.2 The word of justification is objectified in both in preaching and the sacraments in such a way as to shift the focus from authentic appropriation of God’s grace to the question of the surety of God’s promise. Since the risen Jesus is genuinely present in the means of grace, he is capable of mediating a direct assurance of his justifying grace for sinners who look for him there. The tendency of believers to reflect upon and worry about the authenticity of their faith is seen by Luther as a sinful resistance to Jesus’s promise that they have already been accepted. Therefore, instead of “justification through faith” it might be appropriate to characterize Luther’s position as “justification by the word.”

In this book, we will endeavor to show that, although it has been neglected and misunderstood by Protestants and Catholics alike, Luther’s “justification by the word” is a better model for understanding salvation in Christ. It will be argued that this is not only the case because it is more faithful to the teachings of the Scriptures, but also because it is the only doctrine of salvation that fully succeeds in de-centering the self and overcoming the self-incurvature of sin (incurvatus in se). As Luther himself observes in his Galatians commentary of 1531: “This is the reason why our theology is certain, it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves, so that we do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person, or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is, on the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive.”3

[1] Phillip Cary, “Why Luther is Not Quite Protestant: The Logic of Faith in a Sacramental Promise,” Pro Ecclesia 14, no. 4 (2005): 447–486. Also see similar argument in Phillip Cary, The Meaning of Protestant Theology: Luther, Augustine, and the Gospel That Gives Us Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 258–62.

[2] Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas Trapp (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 52–53; and Bayer, Promissio: Geschichte der reformatorischen Wende in Luthers Theologie (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 240–41.

[3] LW 26:38

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

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“Blood with the Pope” or “Wine with the Enthusiasts”? The Luther vs. Zwingli Debate

Thanks to Fr. Andrew Christiansen for having me back on his “Doth Protest Too Much” podcast to discuss Luther’s debate with Zwingli over the nature of Christ’s present in Holy Communion.

Click here for the episode: https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/blood-with-the-pope-or-wine-with-the-enthusiasts/id1549751430?i=1000537778612

From the website: “Doth Protest Too Much is a podcast on church history and the development of Protestant theology over the past several centuries. It is hosted by Episcopal priest Rev. Andrew Christiansen along with Stephen Burnett and Lutheran pastor Rev. Charles Lehmann. It also features interviews and discussions with world-class theologians and scholars of church history. We can be listened to on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, & more.

Follow us on Twitter @MuchDoth & Instagram @doth.protest.too.much”

Image from https://www.dw.com/en/a-tour-through-luthers-marburg/a-39247476

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The Foundation of Lutheran Christology: Pre-Modern Christology

Although confessional Lutherans affirm the ultimate authority of the Bible alone (sola Scriptura), various philosophical traditions have been legitimately utilized by Christians throughout history as instruments in service of the true faith.  The pre-modern and early modern Church utilized thought-forms from Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian sources as means of explicating the central truths of the Christian faith to the post-biblical Gentile world.  Although sometimes the use of philosophy obscured the truth of the Bible in the early Church, more often than not such thought-forms were used critically in light of the revealed realities of the faith.  This can be supremely observed in the development of the distinct uses of the concepts of “substance,” “nature,” and “person” in the debates surrounding the Trinity and Person of Christ at Nicaea and Chalcedon. 

Broadly speaking, most of the ancient metaphysical schemes utilized by Christians shared the common concept of “substance.”  Although various ancient philosophical traditions defined substance differently (Stoic vs. Aristotelian, for example), broadly speaking substance ontology assumes two basic ideas: First, entities in a class or species share an objectively real common nature.  For example, humans have a common nature with other humans.  Secondly, that although certainly features of entities change, there is a core of identity or essence within them that persists over time.  For example, despite physical changes I am the same person I was when I was a baby.  It is easily observable that these aforementioned tenets of substance metaphysics imply linguistic realism and a correspondence theory of truth.  That is, both claims assume that how humans typically use language to designate the identity of a given entity generally corresponds to the actual functioning of the world. 

As should be clear from the description above, the ancient councils and creeds of the Church (particularly, those of Nicaea and Chalcedon) assumed the validity of substance metaphysics.  For classic creedal orthodoxy, God is a single entity (ousia) with three real centers of identity (hypostasis) subsisting through their relations with one another.  Likewise, Christ is a single center of identity (prosopon) whose integrity persists over time.  He possesses two natures (physis), that is, he has a common nature with the other persons of the Trinity as well as the rest of humanity.   From the great councils of the ancient Church, these thought-forms passed into the heritage of the Latin medieval church.  From there were absorbed into the theology of the Magisterial Reformers of the sixteenth century with little comment. 

Image from Marcellino D’Ambrosio, “Early Church Fathers Overview: Snapshot of the Fathers,” Crossroads Initiative, February 10, 2020, https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/early-church-fathers-overview-snapshot-of-the-fathers-of-the-church/.