The Doctrine of Atonement

From Luther to Forde

Kilcrease

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781532639067
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Post-Enlightenment theology has frequently rejected the historic Christian doctrine of substitutionary atonement. For theologians standing in the tradition of the Lutheran Confessions, rejection of substitutionary atonement is particularly problematic because it endangers the unconditional nature of the justification through faith. If one rejects vicarious satisfaction, then the only alternative is to make redemption dependent on what sinners do for themselves. In this study, Jack Kilcrease argues for substitutionary atonement within the perspective of what he calls the "Confessional Lutheran Paradigm." The author also critiques a wide variety of modern Lutheran theologians' understandings of atonement: Werner Elert, Gustaf Aulen, Gustaf Wingren, Robert Jenson, Eberhard Jungel, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Gerhard Forde. As Kilcrease demonstrates, although these authors often give many fine theological insights, their distortion or misrepresentation of the doctrine of atonement carriers over to a problematic understanding of law, gospel, and justification through faith.

1

Contexts and Methodology

Introduction

In modern theology, the work of Christ is a significant point of dispute. The Enlightenment thinkers largely regarded the Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation understandings of the work of Christ to either be crassly mythological or stultifyingly legalistic. In particular, modern theologians have charged that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement makes God into a merciless judge who refuses to forgive sinners apart from the killing of his own son. A related charge is that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement constitutes an act of divine child abuse. Feminist theologians argue that insofar as God the Father abuses his own divine Son, every earthly father, is in some sense, justified in imitating their heavenly father.1

Attacks on the doctrine of atonement are particularly problematic for confessional Lutheran theology. All dogmas of the Christian faith are interconnected, and consequently, the rejection of one inevitably causes difficulties with others. Central to the Lutheran understanding of the gospel is the claim that, through Christ’s substitutionary act of atonement on the cross, God punished all sins and has made it possible to receive the imputation of righteousness through faith. Therefore, Christ’s death as a substitutionary act is the necessary correlate of God’s mercy in justification through faith. In the same manner, if it was not necessary for Christ to fulfill the law of God, it would also mean that God’s law is not an objective standard of morality. This would not only call into question the entire moral order of the universe, but would also create the vexing question of why Scripture consistently describes the salvation as necessitated by the gap between an utterly holy God and utterly sinful human beings.

This book deals with this central question of atonement in Lutheran theology and its current challenges. In the coming chapters, I examine the answers the historic Lutheran tradition has offered on the basis of Scripture. From the perspective of these answers, I will then both describe and critique the alternative theologies of its modern detractors, who nonetheless claim the name Lutheran.

In particular, the final two chapters consist of a close examination of the theology of Gerhard Forde (1927–2005). Forde has enjoyed a great deal of influence in North America over the last four decades. Despite Forde’s wide influence in certain quarters of Lutheranism (particularly more traditionalist ones), his theology has generated a relatively small amount of secondary criticism.2 Therefore, it is important to begin the process of testing his theological proposals against the standards of Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions.

But before entering into a discussion of these various theologies and related topics in the history of the Lutheranism, it is important to establish a clear understanding of the nature of Christian doctrine. This will clarify the basis of the following theological critique. To establish a clear understanding of doctrine as a concept, I will first examine a popular contemporary paradigm for describing the nature of doctrine (i.e., George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine) and then make a counter-proposal. I will conclude with a description of what I will call the “Confessional Lutheran Paradigm.” This paradigm will serve as the basis for the critiques offered in the later chapters of the book.

George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine

In order to investigate a particular Christian doctrine (namely the Christian doctrine of atonement), it is important to first define the nature of Christian doctrine as a whole. In order to do this, it seems reasonable to begin with George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine,3 a relatively recent and widely received model for how to understand doctrine. In The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck develops a taxonomy of doctrinal theories gleaned from his study of the history of Christian theology. He identifies three main approaches to the question of what Christian doctrine is. Lindbeck’s first theory of doctrine is a “cognitive” or “propositionalist” model. In this view, doctrines are simply propositions to be believed, either true or false. According to Lindbeck, this understanding of doctrine presupposes that Christian theology is similar to philosophy or the natural sciences as they were classically conceived. However, Lindbeck finds this conception of doctrine particularly problematic, because it tends to be very static and inflexible: “For a propositionalist, if a doctrine is once true, it is always true, and if it is once false, it is always false.” This inflexibility creates a problem for ecumenism, a major fixation of Lindbeck and many of his disciples: “This [the propositional theory of doctrine] implies, for example, that the historic affirmations and denials of transubstantiation can never be harmonized. Agreement can be reached only if one or both sides abandon their earlier positions.”4

Lindbeck describes the second approach to doctrine as the “experiential-expressive” approach. This approach has its origin primarily in the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century. It was later picked up in the twentieth century (in a form mixed with the propositionalist model) by Roman Catholic figures like Bernard Lonergan5 and Karl Rahner.6 According to the “experiential-expressive” model, doctrine is essentially a way of describing people’s experiences of God. Such experiences are shared universally by the human race. As a result, they can be expressed in culturally different ways according to different circumstances. There is, states Lindbeck, “at least the logical possibility that a Buddhist and a Christian might have basically the same faith, although expressed very differently.”7 The primary difficulty that Lindbeck has with this approach is that it presupposes some sort of privileged access to pre-linguistic experience. Since human beings are shaped by culture and language, there is no such thing as a pre-cultural or linguistic experience.8 Therefore, instead of the outward cultural expressions of inner experiences, Lindbeck observes that “it is the inner experiences which are . . . derivative.”9 This is because inner experiences are always filtered through the language and culture of the person who is having them. There is no such thing as a pure and mediated experience.

The third model of doctrine that Lindbeck identifies is the “cultural-linguistic model.”10 This is the model favored by Lindbeck. It presupposes that religions “resemble languages together with their correlative forms of life and are thus similar to cultures (insofar as these are understood semiotically as reality and value systems—that is, as idioms for construing of reality and the living of life).”11 Doctrines, according to this model, are conceived of as something like rules for cultural-linguistic practice. Lindbeck gives the example of differing rules which vary by country concerning whether one should drive on the left or right side of the road. When applied to distinctions in Christian doctrine, Lindbeck uses the example of the ecumenically divisive doctrine of transubstantiation. Transubstantiation is the Roman Catholic teaching that the bread and the wine in the Lord’s Supper are literally transmuted into the body and blood of Jesus. According to Lindbeck, such a doctrine does not actually represent a truth proposition, but is rather set of rules about “sacramental thought and practice.”12 In other words, according Lindbeck, the doctrine of transubstantiation does not actually tell Roman Catholics what they are supposed to believe about the Lord’s Supper. Rather, it tells them how they should speak and act in relationship to t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Contexts and Methodology
• Chapter 2: Martin Luther’s View of Atonement
• Chapter 3: Atonement in the Lutheran Confessions and Scholasticism
• Chapter 4: Modern Rethinking of the Lutheran Doctrine of Atonement
• Chapter 5: Modern Rethinking of the Lutheran Doctrine of Atonement
• Chapter 6: Gerhard Forde’s View of the Law
• Chapter 7: Gerhard Forde’s View of Atonement and Justification
• Bibliography