Theology Archives - Page 6 of 18

July 6, 2024July 7, 2024

Our High Priest and Suffering Servant Delivers Your Not Guilty Verdict Now

Christ’s Priestly Office

The New Testament repeatedly makes clear that Jesus is not only the kingly Davidic Messiah, but also the supreme High Priest. In this regard, Jesus’s self-understanding and the witness of the New Testament authors stand in both continuity and tension with the expectations of Second Temple Jews. On the one hand, belief in a singular priestly Messiah, or a priestly Messiah who would complement the work of the kingly Messiah, was very widespread in the first century. Indeed, as Crispin Fletcher-Louis has noted, when a messianic claimant insisted he was the Davidic Messiah, he would often find supportive a priest to claim he was the priestly Messiah.¹

Jesus and the New Testament affirm a kingly and priestly role for the Messiah and unite both offices into a single person. Seen in this light, the Epistle to the Hebrews might be characterized as an important confessional document of the early Church. Crucially, Hebrews contrasts Christian messianic belief with the belief of some Jews in multiple Messiahs.

The New Testament authors witness to Jesus’s messianic self-understanding. In so doing, they develop Jesus’s king-priest office using the prophecies and motifs found in three key Old Testament figures: the Melchizedekian priest-king of Psalm 110, the Servant of so-called Deutro-Isaiah, and the Danielic Son of Man.

July 1, 2024July 2, 2024

Christ’s Substantial Presence in the Eucharist According to Scripture

The Augsburg Confession affirms the ancient and medieval consensus of the catholic Church that Christ’s flesh and blood are substantially present in the Eucharist: “Of the Supper of the Lord they teach that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present, and are distributed to those who eat the Supper of the Lord; and they reject those that teach otherwise.”¹ This avowal of the substantial presence of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Lord’s Supper was integral to the Lutheran Reformation from the beginning. In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther criticized the practice of communion in one kind (i.e., the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic practice of withholding the cup from the laity), transubstantiation, and the idea of the Mass as a sacrifice for the living and the dead. Nevertheless, unlike most other reformers, Luther very clearly confessed the real presence based on canonical and evangelical principles. Since the real presence was overwhelmingly the catholic consensus of the Church from its inception, the catholic principle also applies to this theological question.

Martin Luther, *The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—Against the Fanatics*, 1526 (AE 36:329ff.) – image: St. John Lutheran Church, Wheaton, IL

Paul’s Affirmation of the Substantial Presence

First, with regard to the canonical principle, the New Testament straight forwardly affirms the substantial presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. As Luther tirelessly emphasized, the words of institution themselves (“this is my body . . . this is my blood”) do not admit a metaphorical interpretation. The words of institution are a promise regarding the sacramental elements set before the Christian. Moreover, they are also deed-words that accomplish the consecration so that the bread and wine become vehicles conveying the true body and blood of Jesus to all recipients.

June 27, 2024June 27, 2024

The Pure and Clear Fountain of Israel: The Necessity of Inerrancy

Through providence and the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit, men collected God’s auditory words into the written word of the Bible. Contrary to common belief, pre-modern Christian orthodoxy consistently affirmed the inerrancy of the Bible as God’s Word.¹ Sadly, modern Fundamentalist trajectories in theology have distorted this doctrine. Their attempts to wield inerrancy as a weapon against post-Cartesian forms of philosophical Foundationalism have only degenerated orthodox teaching.²

A Sacramental Medium, not an Epistemic Foundation

Today, many conservative Evangelical and Fundamentalist theologians seem to hold that the Bible must provide its own indubitable “clear and distinct ideas”³ to build a foundation for further knowledge. From this perspective, the biblical “foundation” could counteract modern claims of autonomous knowledge. The Bible, however, is not primarily a tool of philosophers, but a channel of God’s creative, redemptive, and sanctifying Word.

It is, indeed, important to affirm the absolute truthfulness of God’s auditory/written words. However, there are better and worse ways to employ the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy. As noted, many modern conservative Christian theologians have conceptualized the doctrine of inerrancy in ways that largely reflect modernist and Foundationalist presuppositions.⁴ Rather, Christians must see the Word of God as a sacramental medium that facilitates both the creational and redemptive exchange between God and his creatures. God speaks and thereby activates the response of his creatures through his auditory words. As theologian Kevin Vanhoozer writes:

June 23, 2024June 26, 2024

How Can We Do Authentic Theology Today?

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

Because Christian theology is embedded in the historical, it is also always contextual.¹ New Testament scholarship of the previous two centuries made much of how our first documented Christian theologian, the Apostle Paul, expressed his theological vision in the form of occasional letters to his congregations.² This pattern continues in the history of Christian thought. Starting with Ignatius of Antioch and moving onto Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, Newman, Barth, and Rahner all theologians address a specific context even in their non-occasional writings.³ In each generation, theologians must look to the Word of God, test the present proclamation of the Church against it, and apply it to the challenges of the contemporary Christian community.⁴

June 19, 2024June 19, 2024

Now, Baptism Saves through Confession and Absolution

The simul of Christian existence necessitates the sacrament of confession and absolution. Additionally, an intimate connection exists between baptism and confession and absolution. In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther initially stated that there are three sacraments: baptism, confession and absolution, and the Lord’s Supper. By the end of the treatise, he changed his mind and reduced the number of sacraments to only two, namely baptism and the Lord’s Supper. This is not because Luther disregarded the sacramentality of the word of absolution, but rather because he saw absolution as derivative of the gospel-promise present in baptism.¹

The Problem of Post-Baptismal Sin

In the ancient Church, there was a strong and appropriate sense of baptism as the definitive rupture between the old life and the new life, including the final eschatological purification. Nevertheless, early Christians fell into a profound misunderstanding of this rupture due to both legalism and trust in an overly realized eschatology. Many reasoned that since baptism brought a final purification from sins, then the Church could not forgive post-baptismal sin. The teaching that baptism could not be repeated further reinforced this conclusion. After all, how could a Christian who sinned after his baptism regain salvation when the Church could not baptized him anew?

Yet, practically speaking, the pervasive nature of sin made it difficult to sustain the doctrine that Christians lost their salvation by sinning after baptism. One direct consequence of this teaching was that people delayed baptism and, therefore, also their full participation in the life of the Church. Such a doctrine was simply unrealistic about the possibility of remaining sinless in an age in which sin and death persist even for believers.