The Self-Donation of God

A Contemporary Lutheran approach to Christ and His Benefits

Kilcrease

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621896081
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In The Self-Donation of God, Jack Kilcrease argues that the speech-act of promise is always an act of self-donation. A person who unilaterally promises to another is bound to take a particular series of actions to fulfill that promise. Being that creation is grounded in God's promising speech, the divine-human relationship is fundamentally one of divine self-donation and human receptivity. Sin disrupts this relationship and therefore redemption is constituted by a reassertion of divine promise of salvation in the face of the condemnation of the law (Gen 3:15). As a new and effective word of grace, the promise of a savior begins the process of redemption within which God speaks forth a new narrative of creation. In this new narrative, God gives himself in an even deeper manner to humanity. By donating himself through a promise, first to the protological humanity and then to Israel, he binds himself to them. At the end of this history of self-binding, God in Christ enters into the condemnation of the law, neutralizes it in the cross, and brings about a new creation through his omnipotent word of promise actualized in the resurrection.

Chapter 1: Mediation in the Old Testament, Part 1

Approach to Scripture, Prophetic Mediation

Approach to Scripture

The Bible is the Word of God (Rom 3:2; 2 Tim 3:16; 1 Pet 1:11; 2 Pet 1:21, v. 25).1 It is absolutely truthful because of its inspiration by God the Holy Spirit.2 For this reason, the orthodox Lutheran dogmaticians rightly called the prophets and apostles “amanuenses of the Spirit.”3 By proceeding in this manner, we stand firmly with one of the foundational documents of the Lutheran Reformation, the Formula of Concord in its affirmation that “We believe, teach, and confess that the sole rule and standard to which all dogmas together with all teachers should be estimated and judged are the prophetic and apostolic scriptures of the Old and New Testament.”4 Indeed, we can have no other starting point. Through God’s election of Israel, he has chosen to make its life and traditions the medium of his law and promise. Just as Jesus Christ is the true and perfect Word of God from all eternity, so too he is present and active communicating himself infallibly to the people of God through the Word of the prophets and apostles. Indeed, the “testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Rev 19:10).5

In light of the fact that scripture centers on the promise of the gospel, we must insist on the reality of its truthful historicity. Although “literal religion” is frequently maligned as childish by our culture, the truth of the gospel presupposes the truthful historicity of the Bible. The “nonliteral” and therefore more “mature” reading of the Bible insisted upon by much of contemporary culture in fact denigrates Christianity into an incipit religion of the law. It is infrequently acknowledged that Liberal Protestantism’s legalism automatically follows from its antiliteralism. If the Bible only presents us with fanciful allegorical stories, then these narratives are capable of doing nothing other than giving us general moral truths. But, if scripture centers on God’s promises which culminate in Christ, it must be the case that God has literally been faithful to his promises in the actual history of the world. To suggest that God’s activities of promise making and fulfillment in scripture are mere allegories or legendary “sagas”6 makes such promises about some other realm and not about the real, literal, historical world. If the scriptural world is not the real, literal, historical world, then what freedom can it give to sinners living in the real historical world? This means that the gospel-centered message of the Bible is inherently tied up with the truth of its history in which God makes his trustworthiness known.

Similarly, to admit that scripture could be untruthful in historical matters would also be to suggest that God’s ultimate promise in the gospel could be an error. Even if we have considerable evidence of the central events of the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ, admitting that scripture can error downgrades the certainty of these events to the level of “probable.” Saying that the biblical documents can be untruthful is to say that their historical claims are to be believed with the same degrees of greater and lesser probability that all secular history possesses. Nevertheless, if we have full assurance of our salvation (as scripture tells us we do, Heb 10:19–20), then the events that underline those promises cannot merely be probable, but absolutely true. Indeed the nature of the faith does not allow Christians to confess that Christ “probably” died for their sins and “probably” rose for their justification. If that were the case, my assurance through Word and sacrament is also merely probable. But these things are not probable, but as Luther repeatedly states in the Catechisms, they are “most certainly true.” They are most certainly true because God makes them known and guarantees them in his truthful written Word. Indeed, as Luther aptly states in the Large Catechism: “Because we know that God does not lie. I and my neighbor and, in short, all men, may err and deceive, but the Word of God cannot err.”7

One could of course claim that only the “essential” facts of scripture need be true.8 But this leaves open the question: how does one decide upon what is essential? Where does one draw the line between the essential and inessential? Furthermore, as we will argue below, if any fact is only meaningful and understandable within an entire narrative framework (in this case, the whole of the history of salvation centering on Jesus) how then can any facts be inessential to the truth of the gospel?9 Indeed, all individual facts contribute to this narrative and for that reason none can be deemed inessential.

In light of this, our method of dealing with scripture in the following work will grow out of the claim that the Old and New Testaments are the utterly truthful, inspired Word of God centering on Jesus Christ as the incarnate eternal Word of God. Because God is the author of scripture, God cannot be thought to contradict himself. Nor does he err.10 Whereas modern liberal biblical scholars break the unity of scripture apart into contradictory traditions, we will read the scripture in a manner consummate with its own claims about itself and with the history of Christian interpretation prior to the Enlightenment.

Because God inspired the scriptures to speak his eternal Word Jesus through human words, we should not in our exposition of scripture shy away from the fact that the Old Testament is to be expounded christologically. This means that typological readings of the Old Testament are therefore completely appropriate. God’s authorial intention expressed through the Old Testament authors was always to point ahead to Jesus Christ.11 In keeping with this, we must also positively assert that the Old Testament is a book of predictive prophecy truly fulfilled in the manifestation of the Savior. Indeed, if Christ were not present in the Old Testament, it would be difficult to say Marcion was not correct after all.12

This does not mean that exegesis should hover somewhere above its concrete historical context. Rather, as we will argue below, it is a question of what contextualizes the history of salvation itself. Just as Jesus Christ is incarnate in the flesh of a particular people and within a particular historical situation, so too the Word of God as it is incarnate in the scriptures is mediated through the thought forms, history, and cultural structures common to the Ancient Near East and the Hellenistic world. If anything, this has been the main contribution of modern critical scholarship. Certain words, for example, mean different things within the context of different historical periods and are frequently used differently by various authors. At the same time, different biblical authors have unique emphases in their theology. Ecclesiastes is not Romans after all! The interpreter of scripture must be sensitive to this, and although some “proof-texting” is not entirely illegitimate, theologians must use it with care to the context of the overall book of scripture.

This means that we will expound the scriptures according to the sensus literalis, that is, the literal sense. This is by no means identical with the “literalism” or, perhaps even better, “letterism” as the Wittenberg Reformers were well aware. In his definition of the literal sense, Thomas Aquinas claimed that the literal sense was the meaning that God intended when he communicated the content of the Bible through the inspired authors.13 Doubtless, the Reformers would not have disagreed with such a sentiment.14

To show how the Reformers understood this intended meaning, we should turn to Luther’s concept of scriptural clarity. Luther spoke about two kinds of clarity, external clarity and inner clarity.15 The external clarity, claimed Luther, was the grammatical and hence historically accessible meaning of the text. Such a meaning was open to anyone. The inner clarity was the meaning of the Bible as it centered on Christ. Since one cannot understand Christ or see the unity of the Bible in him without the Holy Spirit (2 Cor 3) those who read the scripture without faith fail to grasp its true meaning. Conversely, it is also true that one will not understand the scriptures if one does not understand their mode of speaking and grammar, which are of course, historically conditioned.

We can therefore see what the sensus literalis is for Luther in light of Christ.16 On the one hand God communicated himself in the concrete, contextual meaning of the text for the people to whom he addressed it through the prophets and apostles. At the same time, he intended that that meaning might also bear witness to Christ and ultimately drive people to him. Therefore the literal sense is the coming together of the external and internal clarity of the Bible, just as when we refer to the person of Christ in the concrete we speak about the unity of his two natures. The literal sense is not, as modern interpreters have often thought, the meaning of the text as we might want to construe it based on the limited circumstances of certain historical authors.17 Rather, it is the harmony of the literal, grammatical meaning of the words of the Bible, together with the larger narrative of the history of salvation, culminating in and centering in Jesus Christ. This conception of the Bible is consummate with the Lutheran doctrine of the genus majestaticum,18 wherein the divine nature (in analogy to the internal clarity) is not something separate from the human nature (in analogy to the external clarity), but rather communicates the fullness of itself through the external form of the human nature.

Modern liberal biblical scholars have failed to understand this and will doubtless protest that this does violence to the original intention of the authors. Of course, extreme versions of Christian exegesis (beginning with Origen and moving on into the Middle Ages) did do violence to the original meaning of the text...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Mediation in the Old Testament, Part 1
• Chapter 2: Mediation in the Old Testament, Part 2
• Chapter 3: Christology and Atonement in the New Testament, Part 1
• Chapter 4: Christology and Atonement in the New Testament, Part 2
• Chapter 5: The Mystery of the Person of Christ, Part 1
• Chapter 6: The Mystery of the Person of Christ, Part 2
• Chapter 7: The Mystery of the Person of Christ, Part 3
• Chapter 8: The Mystery of the Person of Christ, Part 4
• Chapter 9: The Mystery of the Person of Christ, Part 5
• Chapter 10: The Mystery of the Work of Christ, Part 1
• Chapter 11: The Mystery of the Work of Christ, Part 2
• Chapter 12: The Mystery of the Work of Christ, Part 3
• Chapter 13: The Mystery of the Work of Christ, Part 4
• Bibliography