Confessing Evangelical

A moving account by Dr Ronald Feuerhahn (who was an ELCE pastor before returning to St Louis) on The "Master Plan" of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England, 1954-1985 (327K PDF file).

This was the programme under which the ELCE moved from consisting of two congregations in 1950 to 16 congregations by 1985. The aim was also for the ELCE to become an independent and self-supporting synod, rather than being (as it was in 1950) merely part of the Atlantic Synod of the LCMS. The Master Plan was conceived and driven by Dr E. George Pearce, who sounds to have been a remarkable man. Dr Feuerhahn describes him as:

...one of the most faithful missionaries of his day: a man of vision, a charismatic leader, an avid historian and a confessional theologian.

One innovative area of mission work was holding Christian Film Festivals on Sunday and Thursday evenings. Sunday is an obvious choice, but why Thursday? Because, Dr Pearce reasoned, it was the day before payday, and so many people could not afford to go to the pub that evening. A wonderful example of culturally-sensitive lateral thinking. Perhaps the equivalent today - with more people on monthly salaries rather than weekly wages - would be to organise evangelistic events in the fourth week of each month.

In addition to these novel initiatives, the evangelistic benefits of the Lutheran liturgy were also recognised:

When a new mission was opened in East Kilbride [near Glasgow] ... leaders of the ELCE asked a very critical question. Given the discomfort of many Scottish people with anything that hints of Roman practices, should we have a crucifix and candles on the altar? Should the pastor wear vestments? Should he use our common liturgy? Really, there was very little hesitation once the matter was considered seriously. Not only would such changes be dishonest, for once the new member attended any of our other churches and saw these things, he might wonder why the difference. But more important was the reason given that these things had been a part of Christianity in this country and most others for centuries; they had been there because they are such good aids for the means of grace.

Furthermore, the liturgy was viewed as a mission instrument in the ELCE. It not only was an excellent instructor, it was also an instrument of confession. For when the new Lutherans saw that other Lutheran churches had the same service, they learned of a uniformity not only of form, but also of substance. It was not a rare occurrence when a young family from Cardiff returned from a holiday in Devon to announce with some surprise and great delight that when they had gone to worship at St Peters in Plymouth, they could follow the service because "it was just like ours!"

Looked at from the point of view of meeting targets and what Dr Feuerhahn refers to as "bottom-line theology", the Master Plan was less successful than had been hoped. By 1985, the ELCE had 16 congregations rather than the 23 projected, and some felt that the ELCE had lost momentum by the end of the 30-year period of the Plan. And from what little I know of developments since 1985, the ELCE has certainly had its ups and downs over the past twenty years. However, Dr Feuerhahn is surely right in describing what happened to the ELCE in that period as:

...the two barren mothers (Is.54), two lonely congregations in north London who, under God's promise, gave issue to children. It was one of the most remarkable stories in a society that had long ago entered the "post-Christian" era. Americans are only now beginning to understand the plight that Europeans have faced for decades.

Dr Feuerhahn concludes by saying that:

...those who know the ELCE are reminded of the church at Philadelphia as described by the Son of Man:

I know your works. Behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.

Please pray for us, that this may long continue to be true of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England and her congregations in England, Scotland and Wales.

Last Sunday, our guest preacher (in our pastor's absence on holiday) was Revd Reg Quirk, the chairman of the ELCE. He preached on the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), and it was probably the most helpful sermon my wife and I have ever heard on this story (in the face of some pretty stiff competition), particularly the Law and Gospel perspective identified by Revd Quirk. Here is the gist of it (i.e. not by any means a transcript), followed by some reflections of my own. Any errors, weaknesses in argument etc are my responsibility rather than Revd Quirk's, of course.

This is one of the most famous stories in the Bible. Whichever church or school you went to, you will have heard this story. Even if you know nothing else about the biblical concept of priests and Levites, you know that this priest and Levite passed by on the other side. And the "Good Samaritan" has entered the language.

This is the story of how a traveller from Jerusalem to Jericho fell among robbers and was left half-dead. A priest and Levite refused to help, and it was left to a despised foreigner to help the man: an example to us all of how we should be ready to help those around us rather than passing by on the other side.

That is the conventional interpretation, and it is, in fact, almost entirely incorrect. In order to understand the parable properly, we need to consider two key points.

1. The priest was a good priest, and the Levite was a good Levite

The priest wasn't neglecting his duty when he passed by on the other side: he was fulfilling it. The Law of God forbade priests from touching any dead body other than that of a close relative (Lev.21:1-4). A good priest could not even take the risk of investigating to see whether the "half dead" man was still alive or not. Similarly with the Levite.

In the context, Jesus is addressing a teacher of the law, who would have understood this point immediately. Of course the priest and Levite passed by on the other side. That's what God had told them to do. It would have been shocking if they had done otherwise. There is no suggestion in the parable that Jesus is criticising the priest and Levite's behaviour.

2. The identity of the Samaritan

The Samaritan was an instantly-recognisable "hate figure" for Jesus' Jewish audience. But more than that: Jesus' listeners would have been well aware of who the Samaritan in this parable was meant to be: Jesus Himself.

The worst insult a Jew could make of a fellow-Jew was that he was a "Samaritan". We know that Jesus' enemies applied this epithet to Him (John 8:48). What's more, the word for "compassion" in verse 33 is used on many other occasions in the New Testament, but only of God the Father or the Lord Jesus Christ.

The true interpretation of the parable

We are not to see ourselves as the Samaritan in the parable, inspired to follow his example of neighbour-love (as Revd Quirk put it afterwards, "Jesus never tells a parable in which the hearer is invited to see himself as the good guy!"). Rather, we are the man who fell among robbers, mugged by Satan and sin and left, not just half-dead, but "dead in our trespasses" (Eph.2:5).

Contrary to the beliefs of this teacher of the law, who was "desiring to justify himself", the Law cannot help us: all it can do is pass by on the other side and leave us for dead, like the priest and Levite who correctly and dutifully passed by. We need someone else - the Good Samaritan, the man despised by those who rely on the Law, but who is more than just a man, who is the Son of the Compassionate One.

He is the one who has had compassion on us and rescued us, where the Law was powerless to do so. While the Samaritan "ransomed" the man with two denarii, Jesus redeemed us "not with perishable things such as silver and gold, but with [His] precious blood" (2 Peter 1:18,19).

Finally, Jesus tells the teacher of the Law, "You go, and do likewise". In the moralistic reading of the parable, this is seen simply as an exhortation to show neighbour-love as the Samaritan did. But when we see that we are the robbed man and that it is Jesus who is the Samaritan, we can see that there is much more to this closing statement than meets the eye. When we are restored to life by the Good Samaritan, we are enabled to bring the same life, healing and restoration to those around us who have also been mugged by Satan and sin. We do this by bringing Christ to them through the proclamation of the Gospel.

We are not only to do works of love, but also to bring the Word of life to those who are lying dead in their sins, whom the Law (as found in whatever religion) is powerless to help; and to bring them to this "inn", the church, so that they may receive Christ's saving gifts from His ministers, and there await His return (v.35).

Closing Reflections

All this shows how lethally dangerous a moralistic interpretation of the parables is. The conventional interpretation of this parable seems harmless enough. Who could possibly object to the message of the need to show love and compassion, rather than passing by on the other side? But if this were the aim of the parable, it would have made more sense to make the Samaritan the victim, the despised man whom we are called upon to love.

But the big problem with the moralistic approach is twofold. First, it means we miss the whole point of what this parable is saying about the Law: not that the Law is bad, any more than the priest and Levite were "bad", but that it is powerless to help us; that it can only pass by on the other side as we lie dead in our sins.

Secondly, it obscures the presence of Christ in the parable. As a result, it means we miss the soteriological, ecclesiological, sacramental and eschatological undercurrents in the story. In other words, it excludes the Gospel, and particularly those aspects of the Gospel that are most easily ignored today: that we are not merely hampered by sin, but dead in our sins and utterly helpless until Christ rescues us; the role of the church (and of Christ's ministers) in bringing salvation to us; the sacraments as Christ's gift to His church by which He distributes salvation to us; and the need for us always to be looking ahead to Christ's return.

In short, the moralistic interpretation means we miss the whole point of what the parable has to say about the Law, and we miss the whole point of what it has to say about the Gospel. Apart from that, it's fine :-)

Despite its title, the aim of my post, "Where does the church stop?", was to define the centre of the church, rather than to mark out its boundaries.

It is perhaps helpful at times to look at the church as a "centred set" rather than a "bounded set". This applies both to the church in the strict sense, of those who truly believe, and the church in the wider sense, the congregation gathered around the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments (see this post for an explanation of these terms).

It is not easy to define the boundaries of the church: the point at which so much of the Gospel and Sacraments have been jettisoned that a given congregation is no longer the church in the wider sense; the point at which someone's confession is so heretical that they lose their salvation. The crucial task is to define the centre clearly, and to have as true a ministry of Gospel and Sacrament as one can, as true a confession of Christian doctrine as one can.

However, this "centred set" versus "bounded set" imagery is often used by those who seek to justify their own doctrinal errors/indifferentism or impenitent behaviour, and to argue for an "inclusive" rather than "exclusive" attitude in the church ("inclusive" in the strange modern sense of "indifferent to heresy and sin", rather than in the sense of "extending the Gospel promises to all"). See this Google search for a number of examples of this.

This abuse of "centred set" imagery has its roots in complacency about salvation. Those who "have failed to consider the weight of sin", who fail to appreciate the searching demands of God's Law (with its terrifying command to "be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect") or the full fury of God's wrath and judgment against sin, can feel quite at ease wandering freely around the "centred set" of the church and of Christian doctrine and behaviour, confident that no one can seek to "exclude" them on the basis of some spurious "boundary marker".

However, the fact that the boundaries are sometimes difficult to identify doesn't mean they are not there: the boundaries are there, and they can be crossed. Here's one example; here's another; and here's another. That's precisely the reason why it's vital to know where the centre is, since one can never be sure how far from the centre it is possible to stray without crossing a boundary.

The church isn't an open moorland on which we have the "right to roam"; it's a life-raft on which we are saved from the raging tempest of sin, death, hell and Satan. The further we stray from the centre, the more we run the risk of being swept overboard. Best to stay as close to the centre as you can, rather than wandering about aimlessly or (as many seem intent on doing) standing on one foot with your eyes closed, leaning out over the edge...

A fascinating and persuasive article by Frank Johnson on how "The Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler failed — and a good thing too". Johnson describes the unsuccessful attempt by a conspiracy of German officers to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944, and goes on to consider what might have happened had they succeeded:

Even if [the conspirators] had killed Hitler, they seemed disunited as to what should happen next. Some, perhaps most, wanted to make peace in the West and fight on in the East. The Western Allies would never have accepted that. On 20 July there were no enemy troops on German soil, just as there had not been at the 1918 armistice. There would have been another ‘stab in the back’ legend: Germany had not been defeated in the field but had been stabbed in the back by treacherous politicians and defeatist officers.

We can imagine the Nazis, and the crowds, greeting the returning troops in 1944 as betrayed heroes. It is reasonable to speculate that there would have been something like civil war, with perhaps the Russians moving in to support the Communists. The Nazis would have argued that at the moment of betrayal, Hitler was perfecting the secret weapons, such as the V-rockets, which would have turned the war, and was probably about to build a nuclear bomb too. There could have been strife in Germany for years.

The July conspirators could not have imposed de-Nazification on such division. Only the occupying Allies did that.

Michael Spencer has posted an interesting Tabletalk piece by RC Sproul Jr, asking whether the "Oakmont Family Worship Center" can truly be described as part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. Like the Holy Roman Empire (which wasn't holy, wasn't Roman, and wasn't an empire), this "fictional" (we wish!) megachurch proves to be neither one, nor holy, nor catholic, nor apostolic...

Reviewing my recent series of posts on the doctrine of the church (1 | 2 | 3), the key points that strike me are as follows:

1. The fundamental difference between the Reformed/Anglican and Lutheran doctrines is this: the Lutheran can look at his local congregation and say, "There is the church." The most the Reformed can say is "The church is there" (or perhaps only, "The church may be there"), and the most a "39-Articles Anglican" can say is, "There is the visible church".
   


2. The doctrine of the invisible church is surely one of the major causes of "lone ranger" Christians. Since there's no need to be associated with a visible church in order to be assured of one's place in the invisible church of the saved, the only reasons for going to church are, ultimately, pragmatic: meeting with other Christians helps and encourages you to remain a Christian yourself. This is the position expressed in the common illustration about the single coal on the hearth going cold, while the coals on the fire remain hot.
   
   The Lutheran (and biblical and catholic) understanding of the church is different. Christ makes His gift of salvation available to us in the church, through the preaching of the Gospel and the Sacraments. If we are seeking salvation, then the place on earth to which we are directed is the church, and we find the church in the local congregation at which the Gospel is preached and the Sacraments administered. It's not for us to start looking for some mythical "invisible church" by which we can bypass the "visible church", if we find the latter not to our liking.
   


3. This shows the critical importance of preaching and the Sacraments, both of which (particularly the latter) are often downplayed today. If we find salvation in Christ's church, and we find the church where the Word and Sacraments are, then it is a serious business when "churches" start to cast those means of grace aside.
   
   Fundamentally, it is not for us to say, "How much of the Word and Sacraments can a church jettison while remaining a church?" God has told us that the salvation won for us by Christ is made available in His church, which is found where the Word and Sacraments are duly administered. Our business is therefore to go where He has told us to be, and not to ask questions about the congregation down the road ("I tell no one any story but his own", as Aslan would put it).
   
   However, the fact remains that we are surrounded by churches which have not fully preserved the Word and Sacraments. Should we resort to the Roman Catholic approach of referring to "ecclesial communities derived from the Reformation"? I'd prefer to say that, "To the extent that one finds the Word and Sacraments present, to that extent one finds the church". This seems to do justice to what Sasse is saying about the one church lying hidden "under the various church bodies with their different languages and nationalities, constitutions and forms of worship, and other human traditions". Otherwise, you end up saying that the Evangelical Lutheran Church is the only true church on earth: whereas the Lutheran position is not that the Evangelical Lutheran Church is the church, period, but that it truly confesses the doctrine of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.
   
   There are different points on the scale that need to be considered:
   
   
   • We have the "classic Reformed" position, in which one finds the retention of infant baptism, the celebration of the Lord's Supper complete with the Words of Institution, and (at least in theory) a confession that the Sacraments are God's work by which He creates and sustains our faith, not our response to Him. This would apply also to the Anglican Communion, at least its confessional position (as found in particular in the Articles and the Catechism).
     
   
   
   • Then there are the more Zwinglian (Baptist, non-denominational etc) churches, which usually turn the Sacraments into "ordinances" (human works of obedience), ditch infant baptism and have a "remembrance meal" which is called "the Lord's Supper" but which, as often as not, omits the Words of Institution altogether.
     
   
   
   • Then there are groups like the Salvation Army, which retain a basically Christian confession but have abandoned the Sacraments altogether.
     
   
   
   • Lastly, there are groups like the Quakers, which have neither a Christian confession nor the Sacraments, but which are still generally regarded as being part of the Christian "orbit" in the widest possible sense, and having many Christians within their ranks (see the Quakers in Britain FAQs).
     
   
   Where does one draw the line? One doesn't. There is no "acceptable" level of deviation from what Christ has instituted and given to His church, namely "Baptism, the Lord's Supper, the Gospel, and absolution". There is only a growing danger as one moves further down the list that one finds that the Gospel has been lost altogether from a particular congregation.
   
   But ISTM that to abandon the Sacraments altogether, as the Salvationists and Quakers have done, is a particularly serious and unfortunate - no, make that catastrophic - step. This isn't about denying the good work done by members of such bodies, or questioning their salvation as individuals (there is a parallel here with earlier discussions on the subject of heresy) - it's about affirming the importance of the church, and of knowing where Christ's church is to be found.

In my previous posts (first | second) based on Hermann Sasse's essay on Article VII and the doctrine of the church, we've seen that the Lutheran Church confesses that the church is both an article of faith and a reality in the world; and that the one holy church of faith (the church "in the strict sense") is present in, with and under the visible assembly of Christians (the church "in the wider sense"), rather than there being a distinction between "visible" and "invisible" churches.

Much the same applies when we consider the question of the church's unity:

As with the church, so also with the unity of the church: It is an object of faith. As no one can see the body of Christ, so also no one can see its unity.

Not even "the Coming Great Church" will be able to alter this fact:

If we were to suppose that the whole of Christianity was united in a globe-encircling organisation, on the basis of a constitution and cultus acknowledged by all, and even if the same could be said of all doctrine, this union would not yet make the Una Sancta visible ... [since] there would be those who belong to it only externally and are not members of the body of Christ.

If ecumenists look to the single church structure as the means by which to make the one holy church visible, evangelicals tend to look to the fellowship of believers to accomplish the same goal. However:

Even where we experience Christian, brotherly fellowship, "heart and heart together united," there too the communion of saints remains an article of faith, for this communion, the koinonia of which the New Testament speaks, is a work of the Holy Spirit ... This unity is always an object of faith, not of observation, though the world may see something of its working: "Behold, how they love one another."

In short, the unity of the church is an article of faith, one that certainly cannot be confirmed by observation when one looks at the church today:

Hidden under the various church bodies with their different languages and nationalities, constitutions and forms of worship, and other human traditions, lives the one church. Its unity is also hidden under the divisions of Christianity. The one church is purely an article of faith, and yet it is a great reality in the world.

What is the nature of the church's unity? Look back again at Article VII: "The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered". The church is found where the Word and Sacraments are, and this is the secret of the church's unity:

The true unity of the church ... is both an article of faith and a reality in the world. It is the unity which binds together all those, wherever they may be in the world from the rising to the setting of the sun, who truly believe, who have one Christ, one Holy Spirit, one Gospel, one Baptism, and one Sacrament of the Altar, whether they have or do not have the same ceremonies or traditions. They have one Christ and one Holy Spirit because they have one Gospel, one Baptism, and one Sacrament of the Altar.

On this last point, see also the post on my long blog from a few weeks ago on Dr Ron Feuerhahn's lecture on the Uniqueness of the Lutheran Reformation, particularly the section headed "Fellowship", where Dr Feuerhahn contrasted the biblical perspective of fellowship, in which the koinonia between Christians is rooted in their koinonia in the Sacraments and in a common confession of faith, with the modern concept deriving from Schleiermacher, in which fellowship is a human work by Christians who decide of their own volition to "be in fellowship" with one another, regardless of doctrinal differences.

Our closing hymn yesterday morning (following a superb sermon by ELCE Chairman, the Revd Reg Quirk, key points from which I will blog in due course) was Amazing Grace. While I've linked the original Olney Hymns version, we sang the version from the ELCE's own hymnal supplement. This omits not only verse 6 (and also the 19th century bastardisation beginning, "When we've been there ten thousand years") but also verse 2:

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believed!

My immediate assumption was that there was a Law/Gospel rationale behind omitting this verse (shurely it should be "'Twas Law that taught my heart to fear..."?). But this seems a little over-squeamish: after all, it's surely by grace that we are brought to repentance rather than merely being hardened and confirmed in our sin by the message of the Law's condemnation. Or is my lingering fondness for this verse just another example of how you can take the man out of Calvinism, but you can't take Calvinism out of the man? :-)

In any event, to give verse 2 of Amazing Grace the chop for Un-Lutheran Tendencies, while letting "Shine, Jesus, Shine" into the same supplement with not an iota, not a dot, passing from it, seems a slight misordering of priorities. Straining out gnats while swallowing camels, and all that...

As we saw in my previous post on this topic, Hermann Sasse argues that the church is both an article of faith, hidden from our sight, and a reality in this world. The one holy church "is identical with the visible assembly insofar as this church is present in, with and under this assembly". This means that:

There are, then, not two churches but the one church, which the eyes of men see as a congregation or church body, but in which the eyes of God see those who actually and truly belong to the church ... That is the church proprie dicta, the church in the real sense, in contrast with the church large dicta, the church in the broader sense. It is, however, always the one church which is spoken of, whether it is in the strict or the wider sense.

Sasse contrasts this distinction between the church in the "strict" sense and the church in the "wider" sense with the Reformed distinction between the visible and invisible churches. This is found, for example, in the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles, whose 19th Article adopts Article VII of the Augsburg Confession almost verbatim, but with the crucial insertion of the word "visible" ("the visible Church of Christ is the congregation of faithful men..."). Dr Sasse continues:

Our Confession does not make this distinction between an invisible and a visible church ... It would have been better for Lutheran theology never to have spoken as though there were two churches, one visible and another invisible. This distinction derives from the Reformed doctrine of predestination.

Just as the Reformed distinguish between an external Baptism which is merely the outward sign of an inward baptism with the Holy Spirit, so they distinguish between the visible church of the baptized and the invisible church of the predestined:

This distinction is rejected by the Lutheran Church as unbiblical. Baptism according to the New Testament is not only a sign but the means that washes away sins (Eph 5:26), "the washing of regeneration" (Titus 3:5). So there are not two churches, one the visible fellowship of those who have received a sign of regeneration, and the other the invisible fellowship of those who have been born again by the Holy Spirit to eternal life.

The biblical and Nicene teaching of "one Baptism" is a defence "not only against the idea that Baptism can be repeated, but also against the Platonizing splitting up of this sacrament into a physical baptism and a spiritual baptism". So also with our confession of "one church":

Our Confession confesses only one church, and not two ... When the question is put of whether Article VII of the Augsburg Confession is speaking of the invisible church, as the Reformed understood this article, or of the visible church, as the Anglicans interpreted it for themselves, we simply have to say that the question is wrongly put: the article does not know this distinction, and neither does the New Testament.

Private Eye has excelled itself with this week's cover, one of the best I've seen in years. Almost enough to make me start buying it again.

In other news... Peter Mandelson really is a fascinating figure. Perhaps its just me, but if you're a politician and you attract the nickname, "The Prince of Darkness", I'd say you've got some image problems you need to work on. And he seems to have an effect on those around him which is reminiscent of Tortuous Convulvulus from Asterix and the Roman Agent, whose mere presence provoked immediate discord and enmity among those around him. Tortuous was once fed to the lions - but the lions ended up eating each other instead of him. On reflection, perhaps it would be no bad thing if New Labour's very own Tortuous Convulvulus had a similar effect on the European Commission...

Entertaining piece here about "sledging": the practice, in cricket, of the bowler and close-in fielders attempting to unsettle the batsman using verbal ... um ... banter. For want of a better word. (Though "swearing" would seem to fit the bill much of the time).

The sledge originated in Australia, and one famous practitioner was Merv Hughes (pictured, complete with his fabled facial hair). The article describes how:

Hughes used to take particular delight in abusing shy, reticent, polite and decent individuals, which is why Graeme Hick came in for special treatment. One such episode so upset [legendary umpire] Dickie Bird in a Test match here at Lord's that Dickie was moved to intervene. "Mervyn! Mervyn!" cried Dickie. "Why are you saying those terrible things to that nice Mr Hick? What has he ever done to you?"

But one more inventive sledger was an English county player, Gordon Parsons of Leicestershire:

Parsons' favourite inquiry when he beat the bat would be: "I'll bowl you a piano next ball. See if you can play that."

However, Parsons was once on the receiving end of some "reverse sledging" at the hands of Viv Richards:

[Parson had] just taken a wicket against Somerset at Leicester when Viv Richards strode in and Parsons greeted him with a first-ball bouncer. The ball was still sailing towards a neighbouring shoe factory - where it punctured a skylight and came to rest on a lathe - when the umpire called: "That's your one for the over, bowler." Richards was horrified. "No, no! Umpire! Hey man! Please! He can bowl as many as he wants!"

If cricket's not your thing, then try this amusing article on those riders in the Tour de France who are never going to cause Lance Armstrong much discomfort: those "competing" for the Lanterne Rouge, the last man home on the Tour. (But then again, do any riders on the Tour cause Lance Armstrong much discomfort at the moment? The man's a machine...)

In a recent post, I threatened promised to share some of the highlights of Hermann Sasse's essay "Article VII and the Present Crisis in Lutheranism", particularly what he has to say in the first half of the essay on the doctrine of the church.

The Lutheran confession of the biblical doctrine of the church is found in Article VII of the Augsburg Confession, which reads as follows:

Also they teach that one holy Church is to continue forever. The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered.

And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. Nor is it necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies, instituted by men, should be everywhere alike. As Paul says: One faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all, etc. Eph. 4, 5. 6.

Sasse points out that, while plenty of theologians had opined on the nature of the church in the preceding 1,500 years, Article VII:

...is the first doctrinal statement ever made in Christendom about what the church is and wherein is her unity. Before the Reformation, people were content to confess the statement of faith in the Nicene Creed: "I believe [in] one holy, catholic and apostolic church."

As with many other Christian doctrines, the doctrine of the church is "both simple and inexhaustible":

"A seven year-old child," says Luther, "knows what the church is, namely, holy believers and sheep who hear the voice of their shepherd." (SA III, XII, 2).

Article VII, like the other articles of the Augsburg Confession:

...basically sets down the teaching of the New Testament, where the church is always both an actual, concrete gathering of people whom one can see, and also the communion of saints, the people of God, which one must believe. [emphasis added]

Not only can the world not believe that "God's church, the one body of Christ, is there in that pile of sinners" which they can see, but even Christians are also unable to see this as a visible reality:

The Christians in Corinth had to believe that they were God's people and that in, with and under their visible assembly the spiritual body of Christ was present - just as they could not see, taste or feel that the consecrated bread and consecrated wine in the Lord's Supper were the true body and the true blood of Christ. They had to believe that. [emphasis added]

Sasse continues:

Basically it is the conviction of all Christianity that the church is an article of faith and so not an object of observation. Otherwise the article of faith confessed in the creed about the church would have no sense. "It is necessary that everything which is believed should be hidden." [quoting Luther in The Bondage of the Will]

But if one great truth is that the church is an article of faith, hidden from our sight, the other great truth about the church as confessed in Article VII is that "it is always a reality in this world":

The church is no Platonic state, but an actuality in the world. It is "the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel" (Art VII, German text)

This is because the Word and Sacraments are not mere outward signs of Christ's work, but the means He uses in His church to give people forgiveness, life and salvation:

As the Lord is active in, with and under the dealings of men - as He baptizes, absolves, consecrates, gives His true body and His true blood, gives the Holy Spirit, faith, life, blessing - so a holy church is present in, with and under the assembly of these concrete human beings ... The one church of faith ... is identical with the visible assembly insofar as this church is present in, with and under this assembly.

What I found most helpful in all this was the description of the one holy church being present "in, with and under" the visible assembly of human beings (as highlighted in the extracts above), and the parallel with the Lord's hidden action in, with and under the church's ministry of Word and Sacrament, particularly the Lord's Supper.

The bread and wine in the Supper remain bread and wine while also being the true body and true blood of Christ, and we cannot split the Sacrament into mere visible elements and a separate, "spiritual" reality which those elements represent. Similarly, the visible assembly of the church remains a disparate group of people (including, in many cases, both believers and unbelievers) while also being the one holy church of Christ. While we can distinguish between the assembly we see and the one church of faith, we cannot split the church into a visible assembly and the true, "invisible" church of which the assembly is merely the "outward and visible sign". We can look at our congregation and say, "There is the true church of Christ", just as we can look at the consecrated bread and say, "There is the true body of Christ".

My next post on this topic will look further at Dr Sasse's explanation of why Lutherans (should) reject the Reformed notion of a distinction between the "visible" and "invisible" church, and how this is linked with the sacraments (especially Holy Baptism).

I'm about to start a short series of posts on the doctrine of the church, based on Hermann Sasse's essay on Article VII of the Augsburg Confession. In preparation for that, here's an extract from The Screwtape Letters that perfectly summarises the disjunction between what faith knows the church to be, and what actually confronts our eyes on a Sunday morning:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate.

When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with a rather oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided.

You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous ... Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.

I'm sure many of you will have come across this story before, but I hadn't, and in any event it is a fascinating example of acute observation of people's behaviour (from this article by Mark Steyn):

On August 1st [2001], James Woods, the motion picture actor, was flying from Boston to Los Angeles. With him in the first class cabin were half-a-dozen guys, four of whom were young Middle Eastern men. Woods, like all really good actors, is a keen observer of people, and what he observed as they flew west persuaded him they were hijackers ... [Woods] asked the flight attendant if he could speak to the pilot. After landing at LAX, the crew reported the incident to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA did ... nothing. Two of the four were on board the September 11th planes. Woods turned out to be sitting in on a rehearsal for the big day.

So what made Woods clock these men as hijackers? It turns out Osama bin Laden's team of hijackers were far from master criminals, blending into the scenery:

The four men boarded with no hand luggage. Not a thing. That’s what he noticed first. Everyone going on a long flight across a continent takes something: a briefcase, a laptop, a shopping bag with a couple of airport novels, a Wall Street Journal or a Boston Herald.

But these boys had zip. They didn’t use their personal headsets, they declined all food and drink, they did nothing but stare ahead to the cockpit and engage in low murmurs in Arabic. They behaved like conspirators. And Woods was struck by the way they treated the stewardess: "They literally ignored her like she didn't exist, which is sort of a kind of Taleban, you know, idea of womanhood, as you know, not even a human being."

It apparently never occurred to them to act natural, read Newsweek, watch the movie, eat a salad, listen to Lite Rock Favourites Of The Seventies, treat the infidel-whore stewardess like a human being. Everything they did stuck out. But it didn’t matter. Because the more they stuck out, the more everyone who mattered was trained not to notice them. The sort of fellows willing to fly airplanes into buildings turn out, not surprisingly, to be fairly stupid. But they benefited from an even more profound institutional stupidity. In August 2001, no-one at the FBI or FAA or anywhere else wanted to be seen to be noticing funny behaviour by Arabs.

And you thought "open communion" just meant letting non-Lutherans commune at Lutheran altars (and vice versa)? You're way behind the times. Once again, ECUSA leads the way (into oblivion) as it promotes communion for the non-baptized. The Pontificator doesn't mince his words:

Open communion is baptismal apostasy! There is and can be no theological, ecclesiological, or spiritual justification for the practice. This is a more serious issue than ecclesiastical approval of homosexual unions, for it attacks the two foundational sacraments of the Church. It represents nothing less than an abandonment of the gospel and a renunciation of catholicity and the sacramental order of the Church.

In the comments to my previous post, the issue came up of people getting "re-baptised" as a result of doubts over their previous baptism. In the context, this related to someone who'd been baptised as an adult but who now felt they had lacked a clear understanding of what baptism meant when they were baptised. However, this problem is probably more common among those who were baptised as infants.

In my own case, when I was brought back to faith ten years ago I then struggled for several years with the question of whether I should be "re-baptised". In the end, it was Luther's phrase baptizatus sum ("I am baptised") which finally reconciled me to accepting my original baptism as an infant (this being still some years before discovering Lutheranism). Even though I still lacked a clear positive understanding of what my baptism meant, this phrase at least helped me understand that - despite not recalling the event and despite having subsequently fallen away from the faith - I was indeed baptised. That what matters is that you have been baptised, not whether you remember your baptism. (Only when I was on the verge of becoming a Lutheran did the penny finally drop as to the positive meaning of my baptism: see this early blog entry).

In retrospect, I could have saved myself an awful lot of trouble had I come across the following passage from Luther's Large Catechism ten years ago:

Even if infants did not believe ... yet their Baptism would be valid, and no one should baptise them again. It is here as with the Lord's Supper, which is not nullified even for a person who might have received it with evil intent; he would not, in view of his misuse of it, be allowed to take it again in the same worship hour, as if he had not really received the Sacrament in the first place. That would be blaspheming and desecrating the sacrament in the worst possible way. How could we dare to suppose that the Word and ordinance of God would become wrong and invalid because of our wrong use of it?

I therefore say this: If you did not believe before this, then believe now and confess, "My Baptism was indeed a right Baptism, but, sad to say, I did not receive it rightly." Even I myself, and all who come for Baptism, must say before God, "I come here in my faith and also in the faith of others; nevertheless, I cannot build on the fact that I have faith or that many people of faith are praying for me. Rather, I build on this, that it is Your word and command...

How dreadful that anyone should be put in the position of doubting their own Baptism, when Baptism should be the place at which we find our faith daily renewed and restored. It is surely a work of the devil to make us doubt this gift, since doubting our Baptism is at least half-way to doubting our salvation in Christ altogether. Doubting our Baptism drives us to introspection: "Did I really believe then? Do I really believe now?". This is the very opposite of faith, which always looks outward to Christ and to the means by which He delivers His salvation to us in Word, water, bread and wine.

So don't doubt your Baptism: doubt your doubts, and declare confidently with Luther, "Baptizatus sum!"

We're visiting my parents and sister this weekend, and went to my sister's baptist church this morning. At its best, this church has some good preaching, but today was just depressing. Two people were being baptised - neither candidate explicitly repudiated a previous baptism in their testimony, so let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that these were genuine, first-time baptisms rather than re-baptisms - which, to quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "is supposed to be a happy occasion". And no doubt it was for those being baptised, and indeed for many of the congregation.
 
But it was striking to compare today's service with our son's baptism a few weeks ago. One of our guests at Matthew's baptism commented afterwards on just how much emphasis there was in the service on the forgiveness of sins. At today's service, the emphasis was all on obedience and testimony.
 
The pastor preached on Galatians 3:27 - always a courageous text for a baptist to select, I feel - which was also the text on which our pastor preached at Matthew's baptism, which made it an interesting compare-and-contrast exercise. Ironically, a lot of what this morning's preacher had to say about baptism was good stuff - about it uniting us to Christ, about Christ clothing our nakedness with his righteousness when we are baptised into Him, etc, etc. Unfortunately, all these statements were made in relation to some mysterious "baptism into Christ" which doesn't involve water, which had already happened in the past to the candidates, and to which today's "water baptism" was merely bearing witness. I managed to resist the temptation to flick ostentatiously through my Bible with a puzzled expression on my face, as if looking for where this notion is taught; though I couldn't resist quietly looking up Ephesians 4:5, just to check it was still there.
 
It was also slightly strange when it came to the baptism itself. Each candidate was baptised with the words, "N, upon your profession of repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, we baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit". But there hadn't in fact been any public profession of repentance and faith in the service by the candidates. Each had been invited to speak about "what Jesus meant to them" - one had expressed the hope that God would accept her offering of obedience and make her baptism a blessing for her - but neither had actually referred in so many words to repentance and faith. Nor was there a formal opportunity for them to do so after their testimonies.
 
There was also an unsettling lack of assurance in the service. One of the candidates professed to have been a Christian for 23 years, ever since he'd gone forward at a Crusaders' meeting (23 years to get baptised? What kept you?), and the prayers for him were full of thankfulness for his faithfulness and service in the church over the years, and confidence in this continuing in the years to come. But (and it was my wife who noticed this rather than me) the prayers for the other candidate, a young woman, seemed entirely centred on the possibility of her falling away from faith, especially when she started a year away from home (and from this church) shortly. The impression was given that this was something of a racing certainty. Very odd.
 
I'm sure that these different aspects are all of a piece - the emphasis on obedience rather than forgiveness; the invention of a waterless baptism to which "water baptism" merely testifies; and the lack of assurance in the candidate's salvation (save where that assurance would exist anyway in the absence of baptism).  Luther hit the nail on the head in this passage quoted by Joel Brondos recently:

I also have read that they base their faith on this verse, “He who believes and is baptized will be saved” [Mark 16:16]. This they interpret to mean that no man should be baptized before he believes. I must say that they are guilty of a great presumption. For if they follow this principle they cannot venture to baptize before they are certain that the one to be baptized believes. How and when can they ever know that for certain? Have they now become gods so that they can discern the hearts of men and know whether or not they believe?...
 
You say, “I know, that he confesses that he believes,” etc. Dear sir, confession is neither here nor there. The text does not say, “He who confesses,” but “He who believes.” To have his confession is not to know his faith. With all your reasoning you cannot do justice to this verse unless you also know he has faith, since all men are liars and God alone knows the heart.
 
So whoever bases baptism on the faith of the one to be baptized can never baptize anyone. Even if you baptized a person a hundred times a day you would not at all know if he believes...

I say the same thing about the baptized one who receives or grounds his baptism on his faith. For he is not sure of his own faith. I would compare the man who lets himself be rebaptized with the man who broods and has scruples because perhaps he did not believe as a child. So when next day the devil comes, his heart is filled with scruples and he says, “Ah, now for the first time I feel I have the right faith. Yesterday I don't think I truly believed. So I need to be baptized a third time, the second baptism not being of any avail.”
 
You think the devil can't do such things? You had better get to know him better. He can do worse than that, dear friend. He can go on and cast doubt on the third, and the fourth and so on incessantly (as he indeed has in mind to do), just as he has done with me and many in the matter of confession. We never seemed able to confess sufficiently certain sins, and incessantly and restlessly sought one absolution after the other, one father confessor after the other. Just because we sought to rely on our confession, as those to be baptized now want to rely on their faith. What is the end result? Baptizing without end would result.

Bought a wonderful CD today - Rachmaninov's Vespers, sung by the Saint Petersburg Cappella conducted by Vladislav Chernushenko (US UK).
 
The liner notes describe this piece as "without doubt the most immense, accomplished and homogeneous monument in the whole repertory of Orthodox Church music." Well, I'm in no position to judge: but it is certainly glorious stuff. Just listen to the sample tracks on Amazon if you don't believe me.  Sadly, the sample tracks stop just before the sixth track ("Rejoice, Virgin and Mother of God"), which is one of the highlights of the entire piece. Guess you'll just have to buy the CD, then.  :-)
 
Aesthetically, there's an awful lot to be said for Orthodoxy: see also John Tavener, especially his extraordinary piece for solo cello and orchestra, The Protecting Veil (US UK), or his choral work based on St John's Gospel, We Shall See Him As He Is (US UK) (US links include sample tracks). Oh, and this.

Am gradually working my way through Hermann Sasse's essay on Article VII of the Augsburg Confession. Wonderful, if quite dense, stuff - if/when I really get my head round what he's saying, I'll try to blog a summary of Dr Sasse's key points in this essay. However, here's one stand-out quote I came across last night:

As the life of the Christian is continually threatened by the temptation to sin and to fall away from the faith, and each day we are to return to our Baptism, daily repent, so the existence of the church is threatened by the devil, the world, and the flesh, in which we live also as members of the church.

And the church must daily pray: "Lord Jesus Christ, will you not stay?" Daily, for the evening of the world draws on, let us plead with the hymn of our fathers which was so important to us in the church struggle in Germany:
 
Lord Jesus Christ, will you not stay?
It is now toward the end of day.
Oh, let your Word, that saving light,
Shine forth undimmed into the night.  (LW, 344; cf. TLH, 292)

Things would be better with the Lutheran Church around the world if we all, pastors and congregations, in all church bodies called Lutheran, would pray thus every evening.

(from We Confess the Church, pp.55f.)

I'm sure many of us have had people say this to us on occasion, in one form or another. In some cases one wonders how sincere the statement is, but in other cases I'm sure that it is said by people who find themselves in the same position as Boris Johnson, who commented recently that "my faith is a bit like Magic FM in the Chilterns, in that the signal comes and goes".

In a slightly different vein - "it's the same thing, only different", as our three-year old would put it - AN Wilson wrote at Easter about the "things make me want to stay with the Church, for all its follies, and for all of mine":

The first reason is that it is the Church. My own doubts - often so extreme as to be outright denials of the whole Christian religion - are merely the thoughts passing through my head at any one particular time. There is a bigger thing than me: Christianity itself, the whole Christian history of the past 2,000 years.

Should I, by going to Church, submit my intellect to all the teachings of that Church? Ideally, yes. But even if I cannot put my hand on my heart and swear that I do, in truth, believe "it all", I can at least submit myself to the collective Christian experience from AD 30 to AD 2004 and say: "I want to be part of this. I do not want this to die. I do not want the story that began so mysteriously in Palestine 1,970 years ago, and which has been like the imaginative and moral lifeblood of Europe for the past 1,500 years, merely to stop.

I recall thinking much along those lines myself during my last few months as an atheist. (NB: Wilson rather spoils the effect later in the article by contrasting Anglicanism with the "hate-filled paranoias of Judaism and Islam" - a classic example of what I described the other day as "equivalence": the inability to criticise Islam without "balancing" it with an equal and opposite criticism, however unjust, of another religion).

I now feel more sympathetic towards this sort of talk than I used to. The idea seems to taken hold among many people that first you need to work up some degree of faith in yourself, and then you can go to church to express that faith. But in fact, it is in going to church that we encounter the proclamation of the Gospel in Word and Sacrament, and it is then by those means that the Holy Spirit works faith in us.

It is heart-rending to see people - people who have been baptized into Christ Jesus, just as we were - finding that their faith is like "Magic FM in the Chilterns" and then holding back from going to where the Holy Spirit can work faith in them through the proclamation of the Gospel. It's tempting to see a link between this sad phenomenon, and the Reformed notion that the work of the Holy Spirit can be separated from the ministry of Word and Sacrament. Contrast this with the biblical teaching as confessed in the Solid Declaration:

It is correct and true when it is said, "No one comes to Christ unless drawn by the Father" [John 6:44]. But the Father does not intend to draw us apart from means. Instead, he has preordained his Word and sacraments as the regular means and instruments for drawing people to himself. It is not the will of either the Father or the Son that people not hear the proclamation of his Word or have contempt for it, nor should they expect to be drawn by the Father apart from Word and sacrament. According to his normal arrangement, the Father draws people by the power of his Holy Spirit through the hearing of his holy, divine Word, as with a net, through which the elect are snatched out of the jaws of the devil.

For this reason every poor sinner should act in such a way as to hear the Word diligently and not doubt that the Father is driving people to himself. For the Holy Spirit wills to be present with his power in the Word and to work through it. This is the drawing of the Father. (SD XI:76,77).

If the churches were more conscious that the Holy Spirit works primarily through the means of Word and Sacrament, perhaps that would enable them to reach more effectively those who have drifted away from the church while retaining a sympathy for Christianity.

So when people say, "I wish I had your faith", perhaps the best reply to give is, "Well, why not come to where God promises to give people the gift of faith?" (which is truly to lead people to Christ). At worst, this will quickly show how sincere the initial statement was. At best, well ... "if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins" (James 5:19,20).

(One of our elders is a colleague of Boris Johnson at the Daily Telegraph. Perhaps I ought to suggest he invite Mr Johnson to Christ Church :-) ).

Been meaning to post this for months, and when I happened to look it up again last night it seemed particularly appropriate at the moment:

Things are in disarray ecclesiastically, but at the same time Christ is still daily working in this raggedy church of his. People get saved every day, even through the most mediocre preaching. Souls are sealed for eternity week by week at the most unimpressive baptismal fonts. The feeblest prayers are heard in heaven and answered by a merciful God. People somehow persist in the faith against all odds and despite all setbacks and failures.

The ministry, once a high-prestige, low-stress occupation, is today a high-stress, low-prestige calling in human terms, yet men keep answering the call. Persecution is increasing around the world, yet Christianity (not Islam) is the fastest growing religion in the world. False doctrine seeps in everywhere, yet the lamp of God's pure revelation is never completely extinguished.

• Frederick W Baue, "What Comes After Postmodernism?" (Logia XIII, No.1, p.16)

See also Jason Dart's latest post, particularly his comments on Luke 10.

An unusually sagacious and perceptive net-quiz, I feel ;-)

"Sin is incurable by the strength of man, nor does free will have any validity here, so that even the saints say: 'The evil which I do not wish, this I do.' 'You are not doing the things which you wish.' 'Since my loins are filled with illusions,' etc."

You are Martin Luther! Yeah, you have a way of letting everyone know how you feel, usually with Bible quotes attached, and will think your way through the issues, although sometimes you make no sense! You aren't always sure of yourself, and you can change your mind about things, something you actually consider a strength. You can take solitude, especially with some music.

What theologian are you?

A creation of Henderson

Chris J pointed out in the comments to my earlier post that dividing the Gospel from the Sacraments is a false dichotomy, because the Sacraments are the Gospel, and it is by means of Baptism, Absolution and the Lord's Supper that the Gospel is delivered to us. However, I still think Chris goes too far in saying, "If you don't do those things, you don't have the Gospel". If you don't have the Gospel, you don't have Christ, and you don't have salvation, so this is a very serious charge to make.

There are two ways we need to look at this. Firstly, just as "I know of no other God except the one called Jesus Christ", so I know of no other Gospel except the one which comes to us in the preaching of the Gospel and in the Sacraments.

The Bible was not given to answer questions such as, "Who (in the abstract) may be saved?", or "What's the bare minimum of Word and Sacrament that one needs in order to be saved, or for the church of Christ to be truly present?" Rather, the Bible points us to the salvation won for us by Jesus Christ and distributed and made available to us in the preaching of the Word and in Baptism, Absolution and the Lord's Supper. Helpless sinners have no right to pick and choose which of these they make use of: it is "a whole cloth"; or to put it another way, a "Gospel multi-pack" whose "Contents Are Not To Be Sold Separately".

But secondly, it is an empirical fact that the Word and Sacraments are torn apart by very many churches. As a general rule (in the UK at least), churches which preach the Word faithfully tend to downgrade and marginalise the Sacraments (or "ordinances"); while those churches which retain liturgical/sacramental worship all-too often undermine the Gospel message of the Sacraments with teaching that denies - or is simply devoid of - the Gospel. As I said in reply to Chris, "It would be an exaggeration to say that, in the UK, the churches that say the Creed don't believe it, and the churches that believe the Creed don't say it - but there's more than a germ of truth in that statement".

A church which downgrades or marginalises the sacraments - or which practises them while denying their efficacy as taught by Scripture and confessed by the church - has a defective Gospel, a partial Gospel, and (as history demonstrates) is well on the road to having no Gospel. But in its preaching of the Word - and in such administration of the sacraments as it retains - it does still have the Gospel. People can, and are, brought to faith and salvation through the ministry of such churches. That's not to justify those churches' errors, but it is wrong to say that those churches don't have the Gospel, period.

Looking at the Church of England, even the lowest of low church evangelicals still baptise (both infants and adult converts) and celebrate the Lord's Supper. But in thousands of other Anglican churches, the Gospel is barely heard or understood at all, despite the retention of liturgy and sacraments. They have the "bodily eating and drinking", but in their teaching they demonstrate that they do not believe "these words written here: 'Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins' " (SC, "The Sacrament of the Altar", q.3). And as Luther goes on to say (q.4), "anyone who does not believe these words or doubts them is unworthy and unprepared, for the words 'for you' require all hearts to believe".

If forced to choose - and one day I may have to, or at least my sons will - I would still go for the first type of church rather than the second. An inadequately-delivered Gospel is better than no Gospel at all. But above all, I'm just grateful that, "as for me and my house", this iniquitous choice between preaching and sacraments is not one we are currently faced with making any time soon.

This month's George track token Lutheran piece in Modern Reformation (see previous post) is a wonderful short piece on the last page of the magazine by Revd John Arthur Nunes, titled "Come to the Mercy Feet" . Revd Nunes begins by observing:

I guess it's vogue in our culture. Confession Lite: spilling peccadilloes all over people whom we don't really care about , or hope to ever see again: "I'm gay", "I'm cheating", "Church isn't my thing". Raw confession without refreshing absolution - the serum - that only comes after spiritual authenticity (2 Cor 7:10).

Knowing sin will drive you to your knees - from birth we are plagued with an expansive and corrosive plague. In the Lutheran tradition, we use phrases like miserable sinner ... heartily sorry, and sincerely repent to describe this reality. Then words like boundless mercy describe the Conqueror who travelled here to stomp all over the head of sin, death and the devil for us.

Revd Nunes then goes on to describe the woman described in Luke 7:36-50, who washed Lord's feet with her tears and anointed them with ointment, contrasting her with a young woman he met on a plane who told him that, "For me, life is like totally all about getting to know people". He continues:

Outside of Christ, we are more sin-wrecked than what's imaginable. At the feet of Christ, our faith receives more purifying forgiveness than can be comprehended. CS Lewis once quipped that the Holy Eucharist is the only thing more sacred to behold than people. We daily confess. Christ eternally forgives. Faith totally knows this.

Modern Reformation has recently undergone a change of ownership, parting company from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The press release announcing this was a little worrying, with its reference to "our work to bring reformed [shurely "reformational"?] theology back into the mainstream of the Church".

Then the first issue under the new dispensation arrived yesterday. Now, virtually every previous issue of MR has had at least one full-length article from a Lutheran (what you might call "the George track" - or perhaps that should be "Junker Georg track"). But this time, the theme is pretty much Reformed-only ("Covenant Confusion") and so is the content. I flicked through looking for a Lutheran contribution, seemingly in vain, until I reached the very last page, which had a brief - but brilliant - little item from Revd John Arthur Nunes, which I'll be blogging in a moment.

I hope this is just a one-off, a combination of disruption caused by the new ownership arrangements, and the particularly "Reformed" theme. Michael Horton - "the Reformed heretic it's OK to like" (j/k) - remains in charge, so that's a positive sign. MR was my introduction to Lutheran theology: it would be terrible shame to see it degenerate into a Reformed-only journal (not least because I still have two years of my subscription to run!).

Another rather ironic problem today is that many of these traditions, however, valuable, are now hard to find. The diverse Christian traditions - such as those of Aquinas, Calvin, Wesley - all very different but bracing in their own ways, have been merging into a single generic pop Christianity ... This new popularized Christianity seems bland and one-dimensional, full of good feelings, but rather empty of content. In the meantime, the riches and insights of the historical Christian traditions are all but forgotten. (Gene Veith, The Spirituality of the Cross, p.11)

A number of people have observed (particularly in the last few days) that the biggest danger to Lutheranism today is not liberalism as such, but "generic evangelicalism": the jettisoning of confessional and (especially) liturgical distinctives in the name of "mission-mindedness". Having found in Lutheranism the church for which I've been searching for over a decade - evangelical in doctrine, liturgical/sacramental in worship - it is a constant anxiety to me that this ancient heritage will be lost in the name of making the Lutheran Church "more appealing".

Some political commentators in the UK have suggested that contemporary political campaigning is increasingly focussed on around 800,000 "floating voters" in key marginal constituencies. These floating voters are far from representative of the population as a whole, but they are the people whose votes decide - or at least, are perceived to decide - general elections, and so they are the voters who are most courted. This leads to a very narrow and tedious political discourse, as each of the major parties tries to make itself sufficiently distinctive to catch the eye of this privileged class of voters, without becoming so distinctive as to alienate them.

I fear the same thing may be happening in the church. The equivalent of "floating voters" are those groupings in society who are perceived as (i) more responsive to the Gospel; and (ii) more productive if you can secure them as church members. Top of the pile are probably Young Families. Students and "youth" come a close second. As a general rule, women are probably seen as a better bet than men under both headings (i) and (ii). You can get a "feel" for who these "floating seekers" are by browsing through the website for the Alpha Course, and in particular looking at the people pictured on the site.

What percentage of the population these "floating seekers" represent is difficult to say, but for the sake of argument let's say it's around 40% (though the argument remains much the same whatever percentage it is). The desire to "reach" this 40% then dominates the whole of church life. So, for example, it is perceived that these key groups are put off by old hymns, formal liturgy, doctrinal sermons and the like. Conversely, they are attracted by modern worship songs played by a professional "worship group", a spontaneous, open, informal style of service (with plenty of laughter) and sermons with a practical focus that helps with daily living (though, to be fair, many large churches in the UK do have a diet of sound, expository, biblical preaching).

Now, this approach undoubtedly attracts a lot of people. Churches which go down this road may well find themselves attracting new members. Accordingly this approach will be perceived as a success, and other churches will be encouraged - and indeed pressured - to follow suit.

But what about the remaining 60% of the population who do not fall within the target segments? While "generic evangelicalism" may be effective at reaching the groups I've described, there are many people who are put off Christianity by what they perceive (even if sometimes unfairly) as the inanity and shallowness of "happy clappy" evangelicalism. I know I was and, even after being restored to faith, this aversion was a key factor in my continuing dissatisfaction and disaffection with much of contemporary evangelicalism (as I reported in one of my earliest posts on this blog).

The great risk now is that almost every church (at least, every church which still believes and preaches the Gospel) will go chasing down the same path of Graham Kendrick songs, Powerpoint slides, minimal/zero liturgy, a generally upbeat and informal style, and so on. Not only will this exclude vast numbers of people from the church - and hence, in many cases, from salvation itself - but the church will then find itself left high and dry when (not "if") fashions change and breezy informality falls out of favour (something that I understand is already beginning to happen in some areas in the US, where young people are reacting against the "boomer church" of their parents). At that point, "the riches and insights of the historical Christian traditions" may have been lost altogether, and the church will be forced to try and reinvent them - reminiscent of those societies devoted to reviving "dead" languages such as Cornish.

In the Evangelical Lutheran Church, we have inherited a precious tradition of both doctrine and liturgy. It would be a tragedy to cast that aside just so that "we also may be like all the nations". It would be wrong it itself, but it would even be wrong on its own terms: while it may make the church more "accessible" to a proportion of the population, it would drive us even further away from many other people; and when times change, we would lose even the very slight benefit we might have derived in the short term.

In conclusion, we would do well to learn from St Athanasius, as described by CS Lewis:

It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of snow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen to you.

by Sheenagh Pugh (b.1950), from Poems on the Underground, Ninth Edition, p.131.

While looking for the source of JI Packer's jibe about "broad church pietists", I came across the following passage from Packer's "Historical and Theological Introduction" to his and OR Johnston's translation of The Bondage of the Will:

The doctrine of justification by faith only, which became the storm-centre of so much controversy during the Reformation period, is often regarded as the centre of the Reformers' theology, but this is hardly accurate. The truth is that their thinking was really centred upon the contention of Paul, echoed with various degrees of adequacy by Augustine, and Gottschalk, and Bradwardine, and Wycliffe, that the sinner's entire salvation is by free and sovereign grace only. The doctrine of justification by faith was important to them because it safeguarded the principle of sovereign grace; but it actually expressed for them only one aspect of this principle, and that not its deepest aspect. (p.58)

Erm, up to a point, Lord Copper. That may be true of Calvin; and it was certainly true of Calvinists by the time of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, in which what really counts are the divine decrees, with justification by faith reduced to one small component part (q.33, to be precise) of an overarching system whose "first and chief article" is that of "the decrees of God [which] are his eternal purpose, according to the counsel of his will, whereby, for his own glory, he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass" (q.7).

But it seems absurd to suggest that justification by faith was not the heart of Luther's theology, or that Luther valued justification by faith only because it preserved the principle of monergistic regeneration. For starters, it is hard to square that assertion with Luther's confession of justification by faith as "the first and chief article" of our redemption (Smalcald Articles). And this is further confirmed by the following passage from Luther, as quoted in the Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord:

Follow the order of the Epistle to the Romans. Worry first about Christ and the gospel, that you may recognise your sin and his grace, and then fight your sin, as Paul teaches from the first to the eighth chapters. Then, when you come under the cross and suffering in the eighth chapter, this will teach you foreknowledge in chapters 9, 10 and 11, and how comforting it is. (SD XI:33)

The Solid Declaration then goes on to say:

If we are content to remain with and hold to the mystery of predestination as it is revealed to us in God's Word, it is a very useful, salutary and comforting teaching, for it confirms most powerfully the article that we become righteous and are saved, apart from all our works and merit, purely on the basis of grace, solely for Christ's sake. (SD XI:43)

So Packer has reversed Luther's position - and that of Lutheran theology - entirely. Rather than valuing justification by faith as a safeguard of sovereign grace, Luther valued the doctrine of predestination to salvation because that most fully safeguarded the "first and chief article" of justification by faith alone: that we "become righteous and are saved, apart from all our works and merit, purely on the basis of grace, solely for Christ's sake".

But then many Calvinists - and I should know, I was one of them - have used Bondage of the Will to argue that Luther was in fact a Calvinist, if only he'd known it, and that later Lutherans misunderstood, misinterpreted and misrepresented him. Or as Packer puts it:

No doubt the reader will find the way by which Luther leads him to be a strange new road, an approach which in all probability he has never considered, a line of thought which he would normally label "Calvinistic" and hastily pass by. This is what Lutheran orthodoxy has done; and the present day Evangelical Christian (who has semi-Pelagianism in his blood) will be inclined to do the same.

But, as Josh is always pointing out when Calvinists lob criticisms in the direction of Lutherans, one suspects that JI Packer has not consulted the Solid Declaration before making that assertion.

Couple of good items from the excellent Get Religion site:

"What is the name that al Qaeda leaders most frequently use to describe the enemies that their movement seeks to destroy?..." (read)

"In my experience, the warmest gestures of inclusion usually come from people who spend little time talking about how inclusive they are. When a person flashes inclusivity like a badge, especially in comparison to those noninclusive extremists over there, it's a safe bet an ideological mugging is imminent..." (read)

And don't miss this slightly older piece from Doug LeBlanc on Rescuing St Paul from himself, which provides an "improved" rendering of 1 Corinthians 7, in the spirit of the recent "Good as New" Bible "translation".

I've held off from commenting on the "Good as New" translation until now, largely because - well, it would have ended up calling to mind my primary school headteacher's comment to my parents: "Do you ever find you ask John a question and then wish you hadn't bothered?". However, I will mention Christopher Howse's excellent piece in last Saturday's Telegraph, "Cultivating Prize Tares". Howse is unimpressed by the venture ("Don't buy it, unless money means nothing to you") and writes:

The embarrassing silliness is not my complaint. Nor is [the] habit of calling the Holy Spirit "she", like some camp ordinand at St Stephen's House. Nor even the absurd falsification of St Paul, to make him advise Christians "not to go without sex for too long".

Rather, the main problem is the inclusion of the Gnostic "Gospel" of Thomas, one of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts. The translator (John Henson, though really one wonders if the late Jim Henson wouldn't have been a better choice) predicts this will one day be recognised as part of the canon of Scripture, along with "the sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr", and in place of outworn stuff like Revelation (which he omits altogether). This makes the Archbishop of Canterbury's support for Mr Henson's book particularly puzzling:

...the Archbishop has written before learnedly and appreciatively of St Irenaeus, whose great work was to show why the Gnostics - the people who left the cache at Nag Hammadi - were so damaging to the message of Jesus.

Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp who had known John (the Beloved Disciple). Irenaeus was two steps from Jesus. He knew why it was important to sift out the rubbish from the Gospel. Now it is being shovelled back in.

Well, I finally finished the Book of Concord, so I guess I can now update my post from March and announce that I am now officially 100% Lutheran :-)

Originally I had hoped to finish the BoC before being received into the Lutheran Church, but in the end I decided I was unlikely to come across any "deal-breakers" in the last 40 pages or so that remained unread by the time we were received into membership a week last Sunday. Ironically, the penultimate section (XI, on Election) then caused me the most difficulty of anything I'd read in the entire book. Not that I disagreed with it - and there was some very helpful material in there, particularly on the hardening of Pharaoh's heart - but some aspects of it (especially the foreknowledge/predestination distinction) involve quite a change of perspective for a "recovering Calvinist", and I'll need to go through parts of it again, Bible in hand, to get fully to grips with what it's saying.

But I'm over the finish line (another meaningless self-imposed personal target accomplished - ah, what joy it is to be male!); and appropriately (and coincidentally) enough, on the same day I found a clear-GIF version of the ELCE seal - an ingenious combination of Luther's Rose and the Tudor Rose - to adorn my blog (found on the Westfield House homepage). Makes a change from using one of these, and helps with one of the meaningless self-imposed personal goals of this site, namely to help increase the profile of the ELCE. Clicking the logo takes you to the ELCE homepage.

...while this may be fairly cold comfort after yesterday's vote, it still it has to be said - things could be worse:

      
I don't know enough about the LCMS to comment on what the re-election of Gerald Kieschnick means, or should mean, or should result in. I know that lots of people who I've come to respect are dismayed by this turn of events, and you all in my prayers today. I know who I personally wanted to win, and was praying would win (I'll give you a clue: his surname begins with "P").

But equally, if Gerald Kieschnick is your idea of a "liberal" then things really could be a lot worse. Of course, it may well be that the LCMS is taking the first tentative steps on the journey of a thousand miles that ends in this sort of thing:


but you're not there yet, and it's not necessarily the case that the LCMS will collapse in the same way that ECUSA and other mainline denominations have in recent decades.

As I say, I don't know enough about the LCMS to give an informed view on what lies ahead. All I can do is look at this "selfishly" from the point of view of a new member of a small synod in altar and pulpit fellowship with the LCMS. And what I ask LCMS "confessionals" is this: please don't forget us. Please don't forget that if you tear the LCMS apart - and I know this isn't something you will do lightly, if you find it necessary do it at all - that may have terrible consequences for other Lutheran churches around the world: as we are forced to choose which side to take; as the supply of potential pastors dries up as the LCMS busies itself in internal conflict; and as the infection of liberalism spreads into other synods which remain in fellowship with an LCMS abandoned by confessional Lutherans.

In short, the waves created by any rocking of the good ship LCMS are likely to swamp the small boats moored alongside. I've already witnessed the consequences of US "ecclesiastical unilateralism" in the Anglican church, and the thought of seeing this happen again within world Lutheranism fills me with anxiety. Do what needs to be done; but please remember the consequences for those of us who wish, as Dan requests, to "stand strong" with you.

One person who could not be accused of being "uneasy at, and sometimes incapable of, being asked to wrestle with sustained didactic exposition of theology" (see previous post) is Martin Chemnitz. I'm gradually working my way through The Two Natures in Christ and, while sometimes it's a bit of a struggle, at many other times I've found "my heart burning within me" as Chemnitz unfolds the wonderful depths of what it means to believe in, and confess, Jesus Christ as "perfect God and perfect Man".

And I liked the unexpected touch of dry humour when Chemnitz - in the course of explaining how Christ truly assumed human flesh, rather than His incarnation being merely another manifestation of the Second Person of the Trinity as found at times in the Old Testament - cites Augustine on the difference between the incarnation of Christ and the appearance of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove:

For the Spirit did not come to liberate doves in the way that the Son of God put on human flesh in order that He might liberate flesh by His flesh.

(Also: having read sections VII and VIII of the Solid Declaration in the past week, and started Chemnitz, I'm now beginning to see more clearly the basis for Lutheran accusations of Nestorianism against Calvinists and Zwinglians, and to reconsider my earlier hesitations about these arguments - may go into more detail on that point in a later post).

An excellent book for understanding what has happened to large sections of UK evangelicalism (particularly Anglican evangelicalism) in the past 50 years is Iain Murray's "Evangelicalism Divided", in which he argues that Anglican evangelicals' attempt to enter the mainstream of the Church of England has led to a downgrading of evangelical teachings - a process which has now culminated in the formation this weekend of a group called "Accepting Evangelicals" (no prizes for guessing what they are "accepting").

As one member of an independent evangelical church put it shortly after we'd left our Anglican "evangelical" church about three years ago, "Thirty years ago, when an Anglican said they were an evangelical, you knew what they meant. Now, you can't be sure." Though as long ago as the 1950s, JI Packer was able to suggest that many "evangelicals" would be better described as "broad church pietists" (in other words, largely indifferent to doctrinal issues, but committed to personal piety, conversion experiences and the like).

At one point, Iain Murray quotes the Anglican minister Michael Saward (best known as the writer of the hymn Christ Triumphant, Ever Reigning) who commented on the evangelical scene in the 1980s as follows:

This is the disturbing legacy of the 1960s and 1970s. A generation brought up on guitars, choruses, and home group discussions. Educated, as one of them put it to me, not to use words with precision because the image is dominant, not the word. Equipped not to handle doctrine but rather to "share". A compassionate, caring generation, suspicious of definition and labels, uneasy at, and sometimes incapable of, being asked to wrestle with sustained didactic exposition of theology. Excellent when it comes to providing religious music, drama and art. Not so good when asked to preach and teach the Faith. (Michael Saward, Evangelicals on the Move, p.92, cited in Evangelicals Divided, p.254)

With some notable and important exceptions - such as the work of Proclamation Trust in promoting biblical preaching - from my own experience and observations, I'd have to say that the position has only got worse in the 15/20 years since Saward wrote this.