Nevertheless, we must emphasize
strongly that Christians do not accept the lordship of Christ and His
resurrection because of a rationalistic proof. Rather, Christian believers
accept the resurrection and validation of Christ’s truth claims because the
Holy Spirit works on their hearts and minds through the Gospel (Rom 10:17; Gal
3:2). By the power of the Spirit the recognition of the Word of God as such by
the human subject is self-authenticating (αυτοπιστια). As we have seen, the
Holy Spirit objectively mediates the unity between the father and the Son in
eternity and reveals the same unity in time through the events of Christ’s life
(death and resurrection). Likewise, by working faith in believers, the Holy
Spirit gives subjective assurance of the objective unity of the external Word
and the reality it manifests. He does this by giving faith to believers so that
they recognize the truthful correspondence between Jesus’ claims and the
Father’s truth, as well as the unity between the word of the Bible and the
historical reality of revelation which it signifies (testimonium internum
Spiritus Sancti; Jn 10:27; Rm 8:16; 1 Cor 2:4-5; Gal 3:2; Jn 5:6-12). (Jack
D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture [Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics 2; Ft.
Wayne, Ind.: The Luther Academy, 2020], 99)
Scripture is certainly
self–authenticating (αυτοπιστια) in that we believe in it as the Word of God
because the Holy Spirit enables us to do so. Nevertheless, such an internal
testimony of the Holy Spirit is always tethered to faith in the resurrected
lordship of Christ, and therefore also to His historical promise that the
prophets and apostles are inspired. The inner testimony of the Spirit is not a
kind of interior enlightenment that makes the truth of Scripture an abstract
axiomatic principle. The Spirit enlightens and frees us so that we can see the
truthfulness of Christ’s historical claims and their objective validation
through the resurrection. This fact is particularly evident in the agency of
the Spirit through the apostles’ historical witness to the resurrection in Acts
2. (ibid., 129-30)
