The Self-Donation of God. Jack D. Kilcrease
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further fragmented. One is not simply a New Testament scholar, but a specialist in the Pauline epistles, the gospels, or even just one gospel. Rarely does a scholar at a seminary or in a college’s department of religion see him/herself as competent to participate in the full entire range of the theological curriculum. Rarely is one professor accredited to more than one department. Each one is a specialist in one of the subdisciplines and finds kindred spirits not in his church tradition but in the scholarly guild of his expertise. Faculty specializations are mirrored in curriculums. A course of study is never simply theology, but biblical, systematic, historical, or practical theology. Deeper fragmentation is found in nondenominational and freestanding seminaries where the professors represent different and contradictory traditions and confessions. Even denominational owned or controlled colleges and seminaries engage professors from theological traditions other than their own. Commitment to the beliefs of the church supporting the school is not required of the faculty. In this virtually universally segmented theological environment, students in the seminary and those undertaking a general study of theology of religion are often left to themselves to provide or identify a unifying principle from among the various options presented to them. Pastors coming out of any of these environments, even those with deep Reformation era roots, are more likely to see themselves as preachers and practitioners of religion equipping their congregations to do ministry. They see themselves as professionals and do not see themselves as theologians prepared to teach even a minimum of the faith contained in the creeds that in spite of the diversity in Western Christianity since the Reformation has remained a unifying factor in offering a common Christian faith. A church’s historical traditions are no longer a factor to what the pastor preaches and how he interacts with his parishioners. This segmenting of theology in mainline church seminaries is accelerated by removing the study of religion from church controlled and supported colleges and universities and giving it to state colleges and schools with self-perpetuating boards of regents each accountable only to itself. In these instances historic positions of the churches formulated in the Reformation and post-Reformation eras are no longer factors in the theological enterprise. Theological studies have seen further fractionalization by the special interests of each scholar with the result that theology and religion faculties of seminaries and universities have come to accept the wide diversity of views existing among themselves and they make no attempt to articulate a unified understanding of a common theological task and goal. Diversity is not new. After the Reformation the classical forms of Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism were represented in German theological faculties, as they still are, and a general type of Protestantism once prevailed in most American colleges and universities. Today throughout the Western world Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism have been given a place at the table where only the classical Christian view could once be found. One only has to go to the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature to encounter these continuously multiplying possibilities of what presents itself as theology. For the sake of clarity, when the study of non-Christian options is placed on an equal plane with Christian ones, it would be better to speak of these scholarly endeavors as religious studies and thus reserving and restricting the word theology for the study of Christianity. In this definition of theology as a Christian enterprise, Kilcrease more than qualifies as a theologian.
Kilcrease does not see his task in proposing a unifying principle into the religious marketplace where ever newer options are continually being offered. Rather he sets forth for himself the task of locating a unifying principle for Christian theology. In The Self-Donation of God: A Contemporary Lutheran Approach to Christ and Benefits, he proposes that this unifying principle is Christology, specifically in the person of Jesus as prophesied in the Old Testament as the Christ and realized in the New. By providing a revelation of himself in the biblical narrative, God gives of himself and makes a commitment to its hearers. Revelation is a self-giving of God reflecting what he is in himself. As the title indicates Kilcrease is unabashedly Lutheran and thus not surprisingly he sees justification as the core doctrine; however, he expands his understanding of justification to include Christology as a prior, necessary, and fundamental corollary to justification. Strictly speaking, Christology is the chief doctrine and serves as the unifying principle of the entire biblical narrative from Genesis though Revelation. He writes from within the perspective of historic, confessional Lutheran theology, but he goes beyond setting forth the views of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lutheran Orthodox and first offers a thoroughly biblical theology. Where required, he takes issue with the Lutheran fathers, but is convinced that they understood Christology as a unifying principle of the scriptures around which they developed their own theologies. A confessional theology that attempts to be at the same time biblical and confessional is caught between the Charybdis in being limited to long held historical positions that seemingly are not open to adjustment and the Scylla of biblical theological proposals that is practiced without confessional restrictions and cannot propose for itself definite goals. To the outside observer biblical studies can appear without purpose and so are more likely to create skepticism rather than engender faith. Let’s put it another way. If some biblical studies are open ended with no prior intention of coming to once and for all conclusions, denominational studies begin and end with predetermined conclusions. Theological studies of the historic Reformation churches, including the Roman Catholicism ones, come to predictable outcomes. Methods of biblical studies are so varied, that with their multiple and varied conclusions, they are rarely, if ever, in agreement with one another. For Kilcrease Christology is the lodestone that allows biblical theology to be presented in the service of historical, confessional Lutheran theology and so he presents a principle that provides order to the theological task and a governing principle to biblical studies. Christology drawn from the biblical narrative is the unifying principle for the entire task of theology and so theological and confessional studies constitute one discipline.
Kilcrease sees the divine narrative as it holds the history of salvation together. Adam distances himself from the word by which he was created. He and his wife owe their creation and continued existence to God’s gracious word, but Eve is not content to accept God’s gracious offer and speculates about this word. By so doing this, she seeks to acquire divinity for herself and her husband and so nullifies the first narrative. To salvage the situation God offers himself in the history of redemption that then constitutes the content of the biblical narrative. Adam’s role as prophet, priest, and king is inherited by Israel and comes to a climax in Jesus who is twice anointed, first in taking upon himself and the fulfilling the Old Testament offices of prophet, priest, and king, and more profoundly in being God’s Son through the hypostatic union. God’s self-giving of himself in the Old Testament in the glory residing in the tabernacle advances to the presence of the glory found in Jesus who as God’s final temple replaces the one in Jerusalem. All of the New Testament shows Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament, but each gospel and epistle does it in its own way. Rather than seeing Christ’s atoning work as something in addition to the Old Testament, Kilcrease locates it in the Genesis creation narrative. Humanity’s rejection of God as the giver of all good things leaves each human being in the predicament of having to rely on him/herself. In spite of its alienation from God, humanity continues to receive good things from God but does not recognize him as the giver. Since the old narrative that brought forth creation was rejected, God sets in place a new narrative, one of redemption; that is, the narrative of the new creation. Placed alongside of the old narrative that man rejected and brought death is the new narrative that was first given to Israel and then could be found completely in Jesus. Throughout the new narrative God is the speaker and the content. Jesus is assumed into the old narrative in which God’s promise was transformed into condemnation. By being assumed into the old, Jesus transforms it into a new narrative promising salvation. In believing in this narrative the believer is not only justified, but is included in the narrative itself and receives Christ’s righteousness. In the last chapters Kilcrease discusses Christology along traditional dogmatical lines that defined Lutheran theology from the Reformed kind. Mary’s role in Christology is presented and contemporary understandings of her are analyzed for their acceptability. Kilcrease readdresses Reformed and Lutheran differences over the person and work of Christ, showing that the Lutheran understandings are the right ones. Not at issue is the genus idiomaticum between the two major Protestant traditions in assigning divine attributes to Christ’s divine nature and the human ones to his human nature. Remaining in contention is whether all of Christ’s actions can be assigned to the total person, so that