Disclosing the Hidden God: Confessional Lutheran Doctrine and Christian Apologetics

Abstract

Lutheran theology informs how Lutheran pastors do outreach. What Scripture has to say about God’s hiddenness, the natural knowledge of God, the total depravity of the unregenerate, and the evidentiary and epistemic status of scriptural truths all play a role in the way a pastor approaches the task of presenting the gospel. Pastor Thompson’s essay will examine these and other doctrinal truths and the role they play in doing apologetics.

Those who engage in evangelism (the disclosing of good news) have engaged in apologetics (defending or using reason to present the Gospel). Such rhetoric is, most importantly, based upon theology drawn from the Bible. It arises from the foundation that God is a hidden God. This is his intrinsic nature. Thus, humanity cannot comprehend him, yet God has made himself apprehensible. He reveals himself to us through many masks while simultaneously keeping himself hidden. He has revealed his existence through the mask of nature and conscience to all people. God has further performed signs in the Old Testament to witness to his glory. The most prominent of his special revelation was the incarnate Jesus, where “all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Col 2:9). However, Christ’s transfiguration reminds us that God has yet to disclose his glory fully. With such a historical event, we base our faith on verifiable empirical truths and apprehend our saving faith through unempirical truths of our justification. Therefore, Christians utilize the ministerial use of reason not to show how reasonable faith is but that the unreasonable, unempirical truths of salvation occurred. Thus, we faithfully present the masks of God as the apostles did. We proclaim a faith rooted in a world of objectivity, history, and fact that presents an unempirical, unverifiable, and foolish message of the Gospel.