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).