Week two of conference video begins! This time with the inimitable Dr. Koch:
You may download the recording of this talk by clicking here. To read the post upon which this talk was partly based, go here. He also references this one at some length.
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7 responses to “Big Foot Called My Unicorn an Antinomian: The Double-Bind of the Law – Jady Koch”
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I really really liked this, especially the rejection of inherent immortality? . What do you think of the Kilcrease project? I agree with him about the problems with Forde’s view of the atonement. Yes, Forde also says that antinomianism is not possible, but I think that Forde’s anti-penal-substitution view of the atonement leads to that which is both legalist and antinomian at the same time.
http://jackkilcrease.blogspot.com/2013/03/book-published-self-donation-of-god.html
Mark, thanks for the comments. It was not my purpose to explicitly reject inherent immortality, because I think that Augustine’s read on Plato gives us a good defense for a Christian read on the immortality of the soul as something that can not be dualistically separated from the resurrection of the body—at least, that’s my read on it now.
I have read Kilcrease’s disseration, but not yet his book, and I’m always hesitant to wade into internet theological discussions with my good LCMS friends (much less the ones I’ve never met:) for lack of time and energy:) However, I do love this topic, so lets see where it goes. I liked so much of what Kilcrease has to say, just like my reading of many LCMS theologians, but I do have some differences that may simply reveal my inner Elizabethian Settlement heart:)
Forde’s view of the atonement is exactly the point of contention in Kilcrease’s aptly named:) The Self-donation of God: Gerhard Forde and the Question of Atonement in the Lutheran Tradition As far as I can tell–following Scott Murray and others in their argument with Forde–his fundamental opposition to Forde is to his rejection of vicarious substitution. According to Kilcrease, in Forde’s view of the atonement, law and gospel operate thusly:
“Christ’s activity works law and gospel because in simply forgiving us, he showed us that as old beings we are unbelieving and cannot accept God’s graciousness. In killing him, we recognize this and die. By his continued assertion of this word of forgiveness in the resurrection, we are re-created as beings of faith. In the same way, the preacher’s word of absolution functions as both law and promise in that it both kills and resurrects. Since the word of absolution presupposes that one is a sinner, it accuses as law while it forgives as gospel. As we have noted, this all comes from Forde’s insistence that God’s act in Jesus is wholly disruptive love and self-donation, and that is totally discontinuous with what has come before. . . Forde has thus defined his position on law and gospel as one perilously close to that of the early Lutheran heretic Johann Agricola.” p.196.
(It should be noted here, I think, that “Lutheran Heretic” and “Christian heretic” are not synonymous!:)
Nevertheless, for Kilcrease’s critique, Forde’s conception of the law must be necessarily an “existential abstraction” that is suspiciously docetic; however, per my talk above, I don’t think that the reality of death is an “existential abstraction,” rather, it is the great concretizer in a world of competing abstractions! Forde rooted the “transgression of the law” in a deeper place than has many theologians who have come before or after him in that he grounded the actions of sin as grounded in the primal transgression of unbelief, not moral disobedience. (Interestingly enough, this is the position of Milton’ in Paridise Lost–at least as expounded by Stanley Fish in his book on the subject)) God’s “wrath,” in this respect, is active by its passivity—-the hidden God of the philosophers—or what else could the Apostle Paul meant by the fact that the wrath of God is revealed on all ungodliness by the fact that they “suppress the truth” and, therefore, were “given up.”
This is the state of an abandoned, forsaken world–one that jesus fully entered into by his own admission–“my God, my God, etc. . ” SO THAT we could be those people who were, through the second Adam, i.e., Jesus, given access to the life giving relation to God once again, by faith, however, this side of death, and not by sight.
I must admit that I’m less inclined to judge the “orthodoxy” of a position as to whether it lines up with Luther’s views or not, and I think that Barth and von-Hoffman (and Jenson, Ebeling, etc. . ) have a lot of good things to say that help flesh out Forde’s interpretation in, perhaps, a non-Lutheran way (or, at least, non LCMS) but certainly a Christian way! (I should hope) There is a great book on kenosis by Matthew Becker that I highly recommend, btw, called The Self-Giving God
The goal of all of us here is to find the point of connection between a lost and hurting world and the message of the Gospel. People do not need to be “prepared” by preaching of the Law as if the law was not written on their hearts but, rather, by making what is implicit, i.e., the life of wanton idolatry, explicit. This is not a reversal of Law and Gospel for preaching, but it does change the preaching office w/respect to content and form. In other words. The conviction of Forde re: the law is not that it is “abstract” (theologians favorite catch-all critique:) but that it is terribly concrete—a “sickness unto death,” if you will. The “Sheep” who hear Jesus’s voice are those in whom the Law has already done its work. Like the woman caught in adultery, we are all already judged, but some of us (hopefully all!) are not condemned.
Thanks for your answer. I tend to agree that this is not the place to work through the theology. As a “Reformed” person, at least in my soteriology ( I am a pacifist credobaptist who denies inherent immortality), I tend to disagree that we can disagree about the extent of the atonement and still agree about the nature of the atonement. (I also tend to disagree that you can really put the focus on God’s unilateral resurrection without going all the way to denying inherent immortality.) An objective propitiation which does not result in propitiation for those who perish…does not seem like good news to me.
Make no mistake. I love many things Forde was written, from his responses in Five Views of Spirituality to his Being a Theologian of the Cross. But to get away from what Lutherans have written about Forde to what Forde has written about the atonement, let me quote from his Theology is For Proclamation, Fortress, 1990):
p129–“When one understands that the atonement is actually made through the proclamation it is possible for the traditional vocabulary to be recovered….”
Mark: When the atonement is not “back then and over there”, but something which happens now by means of clergy, I get off the bus.
Forde–“The tendency is to understand the ‘for us’ as ‘instead of us’, that is, that Jesus is sacrificed to pay the debt we owe to God’s justice.”
Mark—This is Forde rejecting the tradition in the interests of something which Volf calls “inclusive substitution”, which to put it plainly means, that when Jesus comes on the basketball court, we stay on the court also and do our part with him. Yes, I know these are metaphors, but we need to at least be clear about what Forde’s metaphor is rejecting. Forde is saying that the cross was the way we humans needed Christ to die, and Forde is denying that the cross was what God the Trinity needed
for there to be a transition from wrath to favor.
Forde is saying that God is only the subject of Reconciliation, and denying that God is also the object of the reconciliation done “back then, over there”. When Romans 5 speaks of “receiving the reonciliation”, Forde has to conflate the reconciliation with the receiving, because he thinks the atonement is not only distributed but also obtained in the preaching here and now. Thus Forde must deny atonement already accomplished, and the atonement imputed in justification.
Forde—“Jesus dies to vindicate God’s determination to relate to us…Extreme care should be taken not to slip back into juridical ideas about appeasing God. ”
mark; please notice the antithesis in Forde. Forde is at least clear, He is not trying to have it both ways. Forde is not trying to sound like he still believes exactly the same thing Luther and Calvin did.
p 130—-“Jesus died for us, to get us, NOT to appease God. The overwhelming evidence of the Scriptures is that God never the object of Sacrifice….
So, for sure, if there were only two parties, one salvation by law, and the other salvation by grace, then I would take sides with Forde. But there are more than two parties. I take sides with those who know that grace is about what Jesus did to satisfy law…..
Thanks again.
You wrote—“Forde grounded the the actions of sin in the primal transgression of unbelief, not moral disobedience.” I can see how you (or Forde) get there from Barth. Even though I am not a Lutheran, I would suggest that this “deeper” is a confusion of law and gospel. Are there people in this world who have never heard the gospel but who are sinners?
I would submit that there are many (most) folks who perhaps have heard the name of Jesus but who have not heard the gospel yet. They have heard: “do what Jesus tells you to do.”. My point is that all these people, who have not yet heard the gospel, are already sinners, born guilty in Adam, and morally disobedient to whatever law they know. (btw, have you written anything on the difference between the “work of the law” and the “law written on the heart” in Romans 2?)
Without commenting on the law/gospel confusions of Stanley Fish and Milton, when you write that “Jesus entered into the world, so that we COULD BE…”, I suspect a confusion of law and gospel. Since neither you nor Forde are universalists, the “could be” is not simply an “in order to” but about the possibility of preaching in the here and now—the killing and making alive may or may not happen and that depends on the Spirit, and NOT on what God did in Christ over there back then.
But hey, no matter how many law hymns I have heard accusing us all of killing Jesus on the cross, I still do not believe them. Those hymns are not gospel. It’s quite a switch from news about what has already happened to being about what’s happening now in the preaching (or the water)
I understand if you put me in the category of a “nonsacramentalist who thinks he’s a Calvinist”. But let me say it simply—stealing a candy bar does not show that you have rejected the gospel. Not all sin is works righteousness. Not all sin is legalism. People who have never heard gospel preaching can sin. I disagree with Stan Hauerwas when he says that ‘sin” is something only Christians know about.
I am also not a “Strict Baptist” who says that there is no such a thing as sin against the gospel. These hyperCalvinists say that since Adam before the fall was not commanded to believe the gospel, that the non-elect are not commanded to believe the gospel. I am NOT saying that. We don’t know who’s non-elect…Those who sin against the gospel may one day come to believe the gospel.
I am just saying that not all sin is against the gospel. I am just saying that Forde’s version of the gospel is not gospel.
I am not sure I would call Forde’s Christology “docetic”, but his “existential” (preaching here and now) is no more “concrete” than what happened already. That “one death” which brought Christ from under law to law satisfied is the same death which now “justifies from sin” (Romans 6:7) . That historical death is not an abstraction.
Christians still don’t need to “celebrate” when somebody is dead. As Jonathan Rainbow ( Earth to Glory, 2003) explained, “ If I die before the trumpet sounds, I want a loud public funeral. I don’t want a quiet private exit. I don’t want them to think of me ‘as I was’. I want them to think that I am now dead. I want somebody to preach about the resurrection.” P77
Of course, when a Christian is dead, we still have hope. Rainbow and I differed about a secondary part of that hope. He still believed in a conscious “intermediate state” for “souls”. And to avoid assuming that the trajectory toward truth runs in only one direction (my way), let me describe my position as Rainbow might: I still believe that there is no intermediate conscious state, and part of the reason I think that is because most everybody who teaches such a conscious state thinks that death is our friend.
But Rainbow and I agree: the body is not our enemy, and death is not our friend. The “killing which makes us alive’ (regeneration, effectual call) is our friend. But physical death is not. As Forde reminded us, (p 6, On Being a Theologian of the Cross) the story of the “exiled soul” is a “glory story”. Also a fiction.
I am just saying that Forde’s version of the gospel is not gospel.
Is that all:)
no, but I would be interested in your reading of Theology is for Proclamation.
thanks again