Tag: Theology

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Enthusiasm and the External Word

Due to the simul of Christian existence (that is, Christians are “at the same time saint and sinner,” simul justus et peccator),[1] the temptation of returning to the self-incurvature of reflective faith is ever present.  That is to say, because even true believers now possess a sinful nature, they are subject to the temptation trusting in their own works or the quality of their faith over what the external Word tells them.  Such a temptation connects with not only the root sin of unbelief, but what Luther called “Enthusiasm.”[2]  Enthusiasm means “God withinism.”[3]  An enthusiast looks inward to his interior thoughts and feeling so as to discover God’s will for him, rather than the external Word of God.  This tendency can undermine biblical authority, but it is also the source of human doubt in the promise of the gospel. 

Because of fallen humanity’s orientation toward unbelief and enthusiasm (incurvatus in se) temptation to doubt one’s own proper reception of the word will invariably arise.  When temptation arises, faith in the Word must inevitably seek a secondary support in refocusing the believer on the objectivity of grace rather than the subjectivity of their own disposition.  Such a secondary support should inculcate the objectivity of grace to the individual believer in a tangible manner and break the focus of the believer on their own inner reception of the external word.  This secondary support for faith can be found in the sacraments of the new testament. 

Disappointingly, most forms of Protestantism have failed to maintain the focus believer on Christ and the Word because of their rejection of sacramental realism.  Indeed, most (though not all) Protestants rejected sacramental realism in favor of sacramental symbolicism or spiritualism.[4]  Since both sacramental symbolicism and spiritualism disconnect the res from the signum in the sacraments, much of the Protestant tradition has denied believers the tangible secondary assurance of God’s grace that sacramental realism provides.  Believers who reject sacramental realism therefore have had to seek secondary assurance apart from the sacraments in moral athleticism or spiritual experience, thereby exacerbating the problem of unbelief and self-incurvature.  Only if the sacraments objectively contain grace can they function as antidote to religious subjectivism.  They perform this task by shifting the focus away from the interior and spiritual reception of grace, to grace’s tangible external embodiment in a physical medium. 

[1] See: Wilhelm Christe, Gerechte Sünder: eine Untersuchung zu Martin Luthers “Simul iustus et peccator” (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2014). 

[2] SA III.8; Concordia Triglotta, 497.

[3] Steven Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hidden in the Cross, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 350.

[4] See discussion in: James F. White, The Sacraments in Protestant Practice and Faith (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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The Hiddenness of God and Theodicy

Under the veil of divine hiddenness and the false conjectures of fallen human reason, there is an aporia between the activities of the Father and the Spirit and with the universal and unconditional love revealed in the Son.  In light of this, human reason inevitably tries to rationalistically harmonize these disparate activities and peer into the hiddenness of God.  Nevertheless, all rationalistic theodicies ultimately fail because they try to justify God’s actions on the basis of the law.  Not only does this demand God justify himself when it is humans who need justification,[1] but because God’s will is not exhausted by the law, God can never be made completely explicable on the basis of the law.  The good news ultimately consists in the fact that although the law is God’s holy and eternal will, God possesses possibilities that transcend the law manifest in the atoning work of Christ.

Instead of creating a rationalistic/legalistic theodicy,[2] Christians must cling to the gospel-promise and operate on the basis of a theodicy of faith.[3]  On the basis of faith in the promise, the believer trusts that the divine love manifest in Christ has revealed the hidden coherence of the triune being in a preliminary sense in the means of grace.  Only at the eschaton, the will the full coherence of the works of the one God be revealed to believers.  Faith possesses the full confidence of the sacramental Word of God, in which the Son has revealed the Father’s true heart to faith through the power of the Spirit.  By holding onto the sacramental Word, faith comes into contact with the objectified gracious electing will of God and can be certain of salvation. 

[1] LW 12:311.

[2] Gottfried von Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E.M. Huggard (New York: Cosmo Classics, 2010).

[3] Paul Hinlicky, Beloved Community: A Critical Dogmatics after Christendom (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015), 72.  Though the general thrust of Hinlicky’s idea is correct, I do not endorse all details.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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Intuitu Fidei in Orthodoxy and Pietism

This deviation from Luther and the teaching of the Formula of Concord came to be known as the teaching of intuitu fidei (“in view of faith”) and was eventually established the standard teaching of Lutheran Scholasticism with surprisingly little resistance.[1]  Lutherans generally held to the intuitu fidei teaching until the nineteenth century when the Neo-Lutheran movement rediscovered Luther’s doctrine of election.  In the United States, this rediscovery sparked the “Election Controversy” of the 1870s and 1880s fought between a series of midwestern German and Norwegian immigrant denominations.[2] 

The teaching of intuitu fidei had many difficulties, not least among them was that it was conceptually incoherent.  The premise of the Lutheran Scholastics remained that God actively created and sustained faith in Christians.[3]  What the teaching of intuitu fidei suggested was that God passive foreknew his own active work of communicating and sustaining the faith in the elect.  To say that God passively foreknew his own active work is absurd and incoherent.  Pastorally, the teaching proved to be a disaster because it held that believers could never genuinely possess assurance of their election, but only that God had at the present moment justified them if they were not actively resisting his grace.  The late Lutheran Scholastic David Hollaz baldly claimed that believers could never have full assurance of their salvation until their deathbed.[4]  Thus, intuitu fidei placed the accent very heavily on the human subject’s initiative in continuing to worthily cooperate with the divine grace offered in the means grace.  Indeed, it ultimately assumed that humans did indeed contribute something to their salvation.[5]  Inevitably, this teaching led to a return to the anxiety of whether one had appropriately cooperated with divine grace, albeit now following a line of reason anticipated by Melanchthon’s psychologization of faith.

In the last decades of the seventeenth century there emerged a tradition within Lutheranism called “Pietism.”[6]  Pietism is often seen as the antithesis of Scholastic Orthodoxy, with which it fought with for theological supremacy until well into the eighteenth century.[7]  Nevertheless, there is a continuity between the two theological traditions in that they both accorded a definitive role to the human subject in cooperating with divine grace.  Therefore, it is arguably the case that Pietism inherited Scholastic Orthodoxy’s problematic theology of sin and grace, and simply drove the disastrous pastoral implications intuitu fidei heresy to its logical conclusion. 

[1] Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and the Wittenberg Theological Method, 266; Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 272-92.

[2] Eugene Fevold, “Coming of Age: 1875-1900,” in The Lutherans in North America, ed. E. Clifford Nelson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 313-25.

[3] Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 458-80.

[4] Ibid.,292.

[5] Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and the Wittenberg Theological Method, 266

[6] See: Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Heinrich Schmid, The History of Pietism (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 2007).

[7] F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 57-8.  See Lutheran Orthodoxy’s classic critique of Pietism in: Valentin Ernst Loescher, The Complete Timotheus Verinus, trans. James Langebartels, and Robert Koester (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 2006).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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Luther vs Augustine on Love

Since the self is properly oriented in its relationship with God by faith as trust, Luther now redirects love to the task of correctly orienting the external person in the earthly sphere.  This represents a total inversion of the Augustinian doctrine of love.  For the Bishop of Hippo, the love of earthly things functions as distractions from the love of God.  Indeed, in spite of being a biblical theme, at this stage of his development Luther seems uncomfortable about even talking about the love of God. Later in the Catechism, he again returned to the formula of “We should fear and love God, etc.,” and lost his aversion to talk of the love of God.  Nevertheless, in Freedom of a Christian, Luther consistently argues that love’s proper orientation is in fact an earthly object, namely the neighbor: “This is truly Christian life.  Here faith is truly active in love [Gal. 5:6], that is, it finds expression in works of freest service, cheerfully done, with which a man willing serves another [i.e. the neighbor] without hope of reward . . . “[1]   

Hence, the creative Word of God brings about a faith which orients believers toward God in Christ, whereas love is primarily directed toward the neighbor: “We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and the neighbor.  He lives in Christ through faith, and in his neighbor through love.”[2]  Whereas the person under the power of sin and self-justification stood curved in on himself (incurvatus in se), now the believer lives a life externalized in the other: first in Christ through faith, then through the neighbor in love.[3]  In this, the self becomes radically decentered in the form of ecstatic existence (raptus, exstasis).  In this, Luther borrows yet another theme from the mystical tradition,[4] yet remolds it around the biblical themes of faith in God and the love of the neighbor.

[1] LW 31:365.  Emphasis added.

[2] LW 31:371.  Emphasis added.

[3] See good description of Luther’s position here in George Wolfgang Forell, Faith Active in Love: An Investigation into the Principles Underlying Luther’s Social Ethics (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1999).

[4] See Karl-Heinz zur Mühlen, Nos extra nos: Luthers Theologie zwischen Mystik und Scholastik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1972).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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Luther on Predestination

Although Luther comments on predestination somewhat infrequently, there is a clear doctrine of predestination in Luther derived from his engagement with Paul and Augustine.[1]  Nevertheless, unlike Augustine, election is described as being something that God executes in and through the preaching of the promise in Christ.  In a passage in “A Sermon on Preparing for Dying” (1519) Luther writes:

“Therefore fix your eyes upon the heavenly picture of Christ, who for your sake went to hell and was rejected by God as one damned to the eternal perdition, as He cried on the cross, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?  My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’  Behold, in that picture your hell is overcome and your election assured, so that if you but take care and believe that it happened for you, you will certainly be saved in that faith.”[2]

Here it should be noted that much like the word of absolution sacramentally contains within itself the coming of God’s justification of sinner, so too God’s eternal judgment of predestination supervenes on the word of the cross.  Unlike in Augustine, there is not gap between God’s eternal, hidden, predestinating will, and the word of the preacher.  To apprehend in faith the word of promise that God has attached to Christ’s death and resurrection is to be assured of God’s eternal election of the believer.

In 1531, Luther offered similar counsel to Barbara Lisskirchen (formerly Weller), a woman who wrote the Reformer due to her deep anxiety about the question of her predestination.  Luther writes in a response letter:

“[T]he highest of all God’s commands is this, that hold up before our eyes the image of his dear Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.  Every day he should be our excellent mirror of how much God loves us and how well, in his infinite goodness, he has cared for us in that he gave his dear son for us.  In this way I say, and in no other, does one learn to properly deal with the question of predestination.  It will be manifest to you that you believe in Christ.  If you believe then you are called.  And if you are called you are most certainly predestinated.  Do not let this mirror and throne of grace be torn away from your eyes.  If such thoughts still come and bite like fiery serpents, pay no attention to the thoughts or serpents.  Turn away from these notions and contemplate the brazen serpent, that is, Christ given for us.”[3]

The key point to notice in this passage is not only that God’s eternal election is embodied in Christ crucified and received by faith in him, but that the faith that apprehends Christ is what Philip Cary calls “unreflective faith,”[4] that is, a faith that does not worry about its own authenticity.  Likewise, as Randall Zachman helpful summarizes: “[For Luther] faith means believing with certainty that God’s Word is true even when the whole world, the heart of the believer, and even God himself contradict the truth that is revealed in the word, particularly the word of promise.”[5]  Faith therefore looks outside of itself (extra nos) to Christ himself and his word of promise.  Again, to look away from Christ would be to return to self-trust and self-incurvature, the very definition of sin.  Throughout the letter, Luther emphasizes that all questioning of one’s election and justification are satanic temptations.  Faith accepts God’s trustworthiness in his word as absolute reality and rejects the unreality of unbelief. 

[1] See: Fredrik Brosché, Luther on Predestination: The Antinomy and the Unity Between Love and Wrath in Luther’s Concept of God (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell international, 1978).

[2] LW 42:105-6.  Emphasis added.

[3] Martin Luther, Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel, trans. Theodore Tappert (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Press, 2003), 116.  Emphasis added.  See lengthier argument in Luther’s Genesis commentary along the same lines: LW 5:43-50.

[4] Philip Cary, “Why Luther is Not Quite Protestant: The Logic of Faith in a Sacramental Promise,” Pro Ecclesia 14, no. 4 (2005): 450-55.

[5] Randall Zachman, The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2005), 9.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).