Thursday, December 22, 2022

Jack D. Kilcrease (Lutheran) on the Internal witness/testimony of the Holy Spirit

  

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)