Tag: Theology

Posted on

First Thesis on Justification

My new book entitled Justification by the Word: Restoring Sola Fide with Lexham Press will make the case for seven theses on justification. Here’s the draft of the first one:

1.     Justification is the center of Christian theology.

Justification is the center of Christian theology because the salvation of sinners is the goal of God’s revelation in the Bible (scopus Scripturae) and the ministry of the Church.  In saying this, we do not mean to suggest that justification exhausts the content of the Christian faith.  Obviously without doctrines such as the Trinity, the divine essence and attributes, creation, and so-forth, justification would be incoherent and meaningless.  Neither are we claiming that all other doctrines are deduced from the single doctrine of justification, as in so-called “Central-Dogma” theory.  Rather, what we mean in stating that justification is the central doctrine of Christianity is that the ultimate goal of all of God’s revelation is to clarify and promote the proclamation of the doctrine of justification in the midst of the Church.

Image from the Institute of Lutheran Theology, @InstituteLutheranTheology

Posted on

The Marriage Debate: Why Christians Lost the Argument Before it Began

https://spiritualdirection.com/2014/02/17/must-catholics-marry-in-catholic-ceremonies

Throwback Post:

I think the question of the continuing deification of the state in modern life is an interesting one.  Ultimately, winning the argument about traditional marriage (by which I mean both the belief in man-woman marriage and also the indissoluble nature of marriage- i.e., no divorces aside from Jesus’ single exception) is a daunting task for modern Christians.  It is a daunting task because even before the debate begins, Christians are faced with the fact that nearly everyone (including Christians themselves) already have a distorted understanding of marriage.

Prior to the modern era, the basic conception of marriage in Judeo-Christian culture was as an Order of Creation and an economic relationship.  Since all property was tied up in land, and land was owned by families, marriage was a way of ensuring intelligent and rational means of wealth transference and (depending on the status of the family) political alliances.  Theologically speaking as well, love was secondary in the definition of marriage.  In Luther’s commentary on Genesis and in the Catechisms, he understands marriage as an Order of Creation established by God that defines the human self in this age.  Here Luther echoed Jesus in Matthew.   

Luther writes that God designed the world to function according to three estates after the Fall: marriage / family (including economic or civil life), the Church, and the government to curb evil.  Everyone has vocations within these estates.

Similarly, the Roman Catholic Church understands marriage as both an something rooted in creation, and elevated by the order of grace.  Though I may disagree with the Roman Catholic definition theologically, the commonality between it and the Lutheran one is clear: marriage is a reality rooted in legal, creational, and economic relationships.  It isn’t about the subjective feelings or personal preferences of the participants.  People in the pre-modern world, of course, did experience romance and love (it’s a universal human phenomenon), but such realities had only an incidental relationship to marriage.  For perspective on this, read some of the medieval chivalric romances: the authors actually assume that love and romance are only incidental to marriage, or in very extreme versions, very nearly impossible within marriage.   

Things changed in the 19th century.  Since capitalism made wealth transference and generation possible without handing it down through kinship, western European and American society developed a new rationale for marriage.  This rationale was companionship and romance, and marriage was therefore redefined as a public ratification of one’s subjective romantic feelings.  After this, divorce became more common. Why?  Because if one no longer experiences affectionate companionship with one’s spouse then the whole relationship ceases to serve its function.  Hence, why not just move on?  Of course there were still legal barriers to divorce, but after the 1960s and the advent of no-fault divorce, rates of divorce went off the charts.  Moreover,  the theory of companionship marriage also made same-sex marriage and other martial arrangements thinkable in new ways.  If companionship and romance are the rationale for marriage, then why shouldn’t individuals of the same sex get married since they can obviously experience love and companionship as well as an opposite-sex couple?

This is why the same-sex marriage argument is so powerful in our context, even though at best it’s an exercise in the logical fallacy of “begging the question.”  In other words, what advocates for same-sex marriage already assume is that same-sex relationships are the equivalent to heterosexual relationships. Consequently, denying gay men and lesbians the ability to marry is an act of discrimination.  Same-sex marriage is a a matter of “marriage equality.”  Nevertheless, the question remains: why can the advocates of same-sex marriage assume that there is an equivalency and appeal to this equivalency with such success?  Because most assume that marriage is a public ratification of subjective feelings about another person- i.e., companionship marriage.  Since most heterosexual individuals in our society already assume this, such an appeal works.  If one, for example, believes that marriage is an Order of Creation and tied to specific heterosexual activities, then the argument doesn’t work.  Also, if one assumes that marriage ordains certain goods that are tied to the sexual diversity of the persons involved and that these goods remain good irrespective of the subjective feeling of the partners, then the argument also falls apart. 

But almost no one still sees marriage as an Order of Creation, and that’s why the same-sex marriage debate is not winnable for Christians in this society: we abandoned the correct understanding of marriage a long time ago. As a result, we can’t appeal to a model of marriage that even conservative Christians unconsciously don’t ascribe to. 

This is a revised version of thoughts first posted May 14, 2013.

Image of Luther and the Three Estates from Bryan Wolfmueller, “Thinking Like a Lutheran: The Three Estates (Quotation Collection Post),” World Wide Wolfmueller, July 30, 2016, https://wolfmueller.co/threeestates/.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

The Irony of N.T. Wright’s New Perspective Approach to Paul

Throwback Post

If you’re interested in the Apostle Paul, you should definitely pick up a copy of Anglican theologian N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Though I don’t always agree with Wright (particularly on his interpretation of Paul, as we will see below), I do consistently find him to be an engaging author from whom I have learned a great deal. 

A dapper N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, 2003-2010 and currently a senior research fellow at Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall

A lot of what Wright says criticizes a certain trajectory of scholarship on Paul that begins with a Church historian and biblical scholar named Ferdinand Christian Baur.  Baur taught at Tubingen, in southern Germany, during the heyday of Hegelianism (1830s) about twenty years before the movement collapsed in the wake of the failures of the 1848 revolutions.  As a result, his interpretation of the New Testament and early Church history tends to mirror Hegelian dialectic.  The “thesis” of early Christianity was Jewish Christianity, as represented by Peter.  It was legalistic and backward, and generally not that great.  Then there was a Gentile Christianity, as represented by Paul. This had a high Christology (as opposed to the Jewish low Christology) and was generally open minded and tolerant. Moreover, Pauline Gentile Christianity pretty much rejected everything Jewish.  These two forms of Christianity fought it out over the first few generations, until the the second century, when Luke wrote Acts in order to pretend that although the Apostles might have had some conflicts, they eventually got along (bear in mind, that Baur dated the NT documents mostly from the second century, something that even secular historical research would not accept at this point!).  Acts created the beginning of a synthesis between Jewish and Gentile Christianity, which found its fulfillment in John’s Gospel of love (love being the virtue that reconciles). We see this synthesis take final form in what one might call the “early Catholicism” of Church Fathers like Irenaeus.  This, of course, was a betrayal of Paul’s theology and “early Catholicism” for Baur is a kind of Christianity that has lost its nerve.  So, the Hegelian dialectic goes thesis (Jewish/Petrine Christianity), antithesis (Gentile/Pauline Christianity), synthesis (Johannine/Lukan/early Catholic Christianity).  Bam!

Continue reading “The Irony of N.T. Wright’s New Perspective Approach to Paul”
Posted on

The Shape of Christian Life Part 2: Fleeing from God not Preached to God Preached

Throwback Post Part 2:

Within this situation, what is the Christian to do?  Luther tells us that the revealed God of the gospel (the God of grace) is God’s real self, despite what might be considered evidence to the contrary!  When we approach God hidden, or God under his masks of law, we can only find condemnation—something actually alien to God in his proper nature (opus alienum).  Consequently, we should flee from the God of hiddenness and wrath, to the God of grace. In other words, we must flee from God not preached to God preached.  Nevertheless, if both are God, how do we know that God preached is the more authentic of the two?  In the Galatians commentary, Luther talks about God in his hiddenness and wrath condemning and destroying Jesus who bears the sins of the world.  The law (in a sense) tries to destroy the promise by condemning Jesus who has entered into solidarity with those under the God of hiddenness and wrath.  In spite of this, Jesus atones for sin, undoes the power of the law, and reveal God’s true heart.  Jesus (the revealed God of grace) has gone up against the hidden God of wrath and law and come out the other side victorious. Therefore, those who are united with him by faith can also share in his victory and therefore have nothing to fear from God not preached. 

Faith clings to the revealed God against the hidden God, and therefore the shape of the Christian life is one of trust and flight from one to the other.  This can be observed throughout the history of salvation.  God establishes his relationship with Adam and Eve through two trees—the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  God attaches his promise to all the trees of the garden as means of mediating the good to Adam and Eve (“you may eat…”).  He gives them the tree of life as a sacrament of immortality.  Nonetheless, he also establish the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as an alternative to the means of his grace.  This was not a test (as John of Damascus and John Wesley have argued), or a means of earning their glorification (as Reformed Federal theology argues), but rather a manifestation of the irrationality of God not preached.  In other words, the tree is in a sense inexplicable.  Why put the possibility of becoming evil in the midst of the good creation?  It is a mystery, a manifestation of the hidden God.  Nevertheless, it was also formative of the obedience of Adam and Eve, which ultimately constituted a sacrifice of praise to God, as Luther argues.  Because Adam and Eve found God not preached in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the structure of their believing existence was the flight from God not preached (that is, the God of destructive condemnation) to God preached (that is, his manifestation in the other trees of the garden and the tree of life).  Adam and Eve only entered into sin and condemnation when they sought God not preached and ignored God as manifested to them in his Word.

Continue reading “The Shape of Christian Life Part 2: Fleeing from God not Preached to God Preached”