This is the next in a monthly series of articles requested by the New Jersey District President commemorating anniversaries of particular writings or events in the life of Martin Luther. They are intended to introduce the historical background and theological content and implications of those writings or events, as well as raise questions about how they might pertain to consciously Lutheran parish ministry in twenty-first century America. The purpose is not to provide answers to these difficult questions, but to provoke reflection, personally or jointly, on how Luther’s life and thought relate to the challenges facing us.
How would you respond if someone accused you of heresy? Odds are, you would be angry, frustrated, possibly even embarrassed. If cooler heads prevailed, though, it might prove beneficial for you. Let’s say you actually were wrong about something, maybe even something of vital importance to the faith. This would allow you an opportunity to study the topic more closely, to learn from those who know more about the topic, to identify where you went wrong and how you went wrong. Not only would you correct your error, but you may even correct certain tendencies in your thinking that led to the problem in the first place (maybe an overreliance upon church history, like certain church fathers, or overconfidence in your Greek or Hebrew skills). But let’s assume you were not wrong—because, let’s be honest, this is what we envision in our mind’s eye—and you had a chance to prove your case. In this situation, your accuser or others supporting the accusation would have a chance to correct their thinking and to learn from you, while you would have the opportunity to clarify your thinking and substantiate your arguments better. There is no loser in these scenarios: we are all better for it, not because we are right, but because we have been corrected where we were wrong or forced to be more clear where we were right. Error is avoided, truth is defended, consciences are clean, and brothers are reconciled. In an ideal world, that is what should have happened when Martin Luther was accused of heresy in the sixteenth century. It should have been an opportunity to talk about important, but divisive and unclear topics like justification, the sacraments, biblical authority, and church authority, among others. It should have produced greater clarity and agreement on areas where unity is necessary, and maybe greater charity in areas where freedom is necessary. That, of course, is not what happened. Literally within weeks of Luther’s “95 Theses” being printed, translated into German from Latin, and distributed widely, critics had already proceeded against him. University theology faculties condemned his teachings, his regional bishops reported him to Rome, and the authorities in Rome dismissed his complaints. Luther called for a debate over disputable teachings, but the debate never happened. Before he could defend himself, legal proceedings against him had begun. The authorities presumed Luther guilty, not innocent, and offered him no opportunity for debate or explanation. He defended his theses on indulgences in print, clarified his points in sermons for the general populace, sought to explain his positions when Cardinal Cajetan only demanded that he renounce them (“Revoco!”), and appealed to popes and councils for a fair hearing. Yet none of this worked. Luther’s opponents never granted his points, allowed for disagreement, or sought to reconcile with the Mendicant Friar from Wittenberg. After many twists and turns over the course of three years, Rome finally excommunicated Luther. First, it published a bull of condemnation in summer 1520, which was later announced in Wittenberg in October, thereby giving Luther 60 days to renounce his teachings or face excommunication. The bull, “Exsurge Domine,” allowed little wiggle room for Luther. It condemned him and his teaching, not to mention all those who taught as he did, or supported his right to teach what he did. “Exsurge Domine” specifically listed 41 errors of Luther, some taken from his writings, some taken from his public disputations, some taken from reports of what he wrote or said, and many—if not most—taken out of context in order to exaggerate Luther’s points and make his positions even more controversial. This then led to the final act of excommunication, when in January 1521 the bull “Decet Romanum Pontificem” declared Luther a heretic duly excommunicated from the church. There would be no way forward. Luther stood condemned and excommunicated, partly for teaching against established doctrines of the church, but mostly for refusing to submit to church authority when it rejected his opinions, despite the fact that it may have never quite understood his opinions, let alone given them a fair hearing. That is where we stand in March 1521, just one month prior to his appearance at the Diet of Worms, where Luther famously declared: “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise, here I stand, may God help me. Amen.” (LW 32:112). But could things have been otherwise? In the months since “Exsurge Domine” was pronounced, Luther had written a series of tracts against it—two in Latin, two in German. His latest attempt, March 1521’s “Defense and Explanation of All the Articles,” addressed each and every one of the 41 articles of error listed in the bull. Some responses are more useful than others. At times, he engages biblically or theologically with the alleged errors. Other times, he dismisses them curtly. In most cases, he criticizes the pope—whether the pope had anything to do with the condemned article or not. By this time, Luther’s excommunication and, with it, the splintering of Western Christianity, was a foregone conclusion. This was never the outcome Luther sought. He wanted theological clarity, biblical accuracy, faithfulness to the gospel, and pastoral accountability for souls burdened by incorrect preaching or teaching. He had hoped to achieve this, first, with rigorous academic debate and theological writing. Reform had to start with those teaching error, principally at universities founded by the church, and only then could it stand a chance of spreading more widely, influencing church leaders, parish priests, monastic orders, and finally infiltrating local churches and lay people through improved preaching, teaching, worship, and sacramental practice. That would have taken time and patience on his part, but also the willingness of those who disagreed with him to listen and debate him, sympathetically, fairly, perhaps with open minds. He hoped that his positions would persuade those who disagreed. For instance, in the discussions following his stance at the Diet of Worms, Luther cited the case of Gamaliel in Acts 5: “For if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them” (Acts 5:28b-39a, ESV). He then admitted that if his work “were not from God, within three years, or even two, it would perish of its own accord” (LW 31:121). Luther simply wanted an opportunity to make his case, to convince others with his arguments, and to let the Spirit convict the hearts and minds of the faithful about the truth of Holy Scripture. Yet Luther was never given an opportunity for the kind of honest, open debate he requested. We are more fortunate today. We have structures established precisely to provide such a means for conversation when disagreements arise, though we sadly think of them as bureaucratic limitations rather than the discussion facilitators they are meant to be. As a denomination, we submit ourselves unequivocally to Holy Scripture and to the Lutheran Confessions as the accurate interpretation of those Scriptures. Likewise, our clergy agree to teach in accordance with what the denomination has officially affirmed in its convention resolutions, including various doctrinal statements affirmed throughout the history of the Missouri Synod. Yet, as thinkers wrestling with new and different intellectual and cultural challenges, we may find ourselves questioning certain theological tenets. When that does happen, we are not dismissed out of hand or automatically excommunicated. On the contrary, we have constitutional processes like dissent and dispute resolution intended to facilitate the sort of conversation and debate Luther himself was denied. The process of dissent, for instance, allows someone to raise questions about our doctrinal position, first privately in the context of one’s own pastoral peers, then with theologians responsible for assessing that position, and finally through an overture to a Synod convention. This multi-layered process does not seek to prohibit disagreement, but to further understanding through conversation—with brother pastors, theologians, and convention floor committees and delegates. What may seem like bureaucracy to some is actually intended as a forum for productive disagreement, conversation, and correction. How different might Luther’s case have gone if he had structures like ours in place? What might his cause have looked like if debate were allowed and discussion promoted? What if Luther had received a fair trial (as was customary for a university professor accused of heresy) and had not been cited, condemned, and excommunicated without a legitimate hearing of his views? That, in fact, is Luther’s basic contention at the Diet of Worms, when he called for the authorities to persuade him by Scripture and clear reason, or that he would otherwise cling to his conscience because it is captive to God’s Word. What he wanted at Worms is what he had been deprived of all along—conversation, debate, discussion, and, Lord willing, constructive resolution. For more on what happened at Worms, please join us on April 17-18, 2021, at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Ridgewood, NJ, as we commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Diet of Worms. With lectures on Saturday and a celebratory hymn festival on Sunday, we will reflect on what led to Worms, what happened after it, and what we might learn from it today. What we may learn is that Luther’s case would have been benefited from having just the sort of structures in place that we have today. That alone may be a reason to embrace them and be thankful for them rather than deriding them as bureaucratic red tape or a Lutheran version of the Inquisition. So, then, back to us: how would you respond if accused of heresy? What could you possibly be afraid of? You could do worse than modeling yourselves after Luther. Like Luther, if you are wrong, then you would hope for an opportunity to discuss your positions and be open to correction. If you are right, however, also like Luther you would want an opportunity to discuss and debate the issues fairly and openly, in the spirit of fraternal love. In either case, though, what you should desire—what Luther desired and never received—is the chance for conversation about these important ideas we believe, teach, and confess together, precisely so that we can articulate them correctly and clearly. You realize that these ideas we believe, teach, and confess actually do matter, that they shape the trust people place in their Lord and the way people conduct their lives. You realize that as a sinner whose very nature has been corrupted by sin (Formula of Concord 1) and whose mind needs to be renewed (Romans 12:2), you can and have been wrong, and that at times you need correction. Finally, you realize that the “mutual conversation and consolation of the brethren” (Smalcald Articles III/4), can be of great benefit not just personally, but even theologically, as iron sharpening iron (Proverbs 27:17). We need not fear correction. It can only help. It can only help make us more theologically thoughtful, more exegetically patient, more pastorally responsible with the task entrusted to us, more personally sensitive to the things we say and do and the affect they may have. Who wouldn’t want that?
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This is the next in a monthly series of articles requested by the New Jersey District President commemorating anniversaries of particular writings or events in the life of Martin Luther. They are intended to introduce the historical background and theological content and implications of those writings or events, as well as raise questions about how they might pertain to consciously Lutheran parish ministry in twenty-first century America. The purpose is not to provide answers to these difficult questions, but to provoke reflection, personally or jointly, on how Luther’s life and thought relate to the challenges facing us.
The priesthood of all believers has become as ingrained in Lutheranism as any other teaching. Yet it has also created great confusion. The Scriptures do not speak much about it, with the exception of 1 Peter 2, which refers to the church built upon faith in Christ as “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9, ESV) that has spiritually succeeded Israel. Likewise, the Lutheran Confessions only once use the terms, with Philip Melanchthon simply affirming that the church has the “right of choosing and ordaining ministers” because “it alone possesses the priesthood” (Treatise, 341.69, Kolb/Wengert). Luther frequently used it in the early years of his reforms, then it scarcely appears in his subsequent writings. Despite these limited references in Scripture and the Confessions, the priesthood of all believers has taken on a life of its own. It has come to define the relationship between clergy and laity and led to tensions over just who has the proper authority in the church—the pastor or the congregation? Yet that is not what Luther had in mind. Luther never sought to set the pastor against the people or oppose clergy and congregation, nor did he use the priesthood of believers to diminish the qualifications, preparations, or responsibilities of the pastoral office. Rather, he appealed to the Scriptural definition of the priesthood to argue that an unbiblical definition of the priesthood had obscured the pastoral office and detracted from what pastors were sent to do: care for their people through preaching the Word and administering the sacraments. Before we can understand why Luther had to redefine the priesthood and, by extension, the pastoral office in biblical terms, it is important to remember that the Christian church has never had a monolithic structure of the church or the pastoral office. The New Testament uses a host of different words to refer to the pastoral office, and we translate it in various places as bishop, presbyter, shepherd, elder, or deacon—pastor simply being the Latin word for “shepherd.” The early church largely adopted a threefold order of bishop, presbyter, and deacon. With the development of monasticism in the medieval church, it became necessary to distinguish between regular clergy, or those in a monastic order, who were governed by a monastic rule (“regular” coming from the Latin word for rule), and secular clergy, or those who served in the more conventional hierarchy of the church. Eventually, seven ranks or grades of clergy evolved: porter (opened the doors of sacristy and baptistry in liturgy), lector (reader of biblical texts other than the Gospel), exorcist (participated in baptism), acolyte (assisted with candles, processions, and other liturgical duties), sub-deacon (assisted deacon in liturgy), deacon (assisted the priest in celebrating the sacrament), and priest (celebrated the sacrament). By the time Luther came onto the scene, you had a miscellany of pastoral offices, ranging from the hierarchy of pope, bishop, and priest to various monastic orders with their own ranks and responsibilities. All this to say that Luther did not set out to reject the traditional forms of ministry, but rather to clarify them in accordance with Scripture. The way Luther sought to clarify the office of the ministry, however, caused much controversy. First, in his Address to the Christian Nobility, Luther opposed the notion that the clergy, or “sacred estate,” had more importance than any other Christian. He argued that ordained priests were no different in God’s sight: because of baptism, we are all priests. Dismissing the idea that ordination by a bishop is necessary to enter the pastoral office, he uses his “desert island” analogy: if a group of laymen were on a desert island without a priest, or without a bishop to ordain a priest, they could simply select one from their midst to do the job on their behalf (LW 44:128). Later, in his Babylonian Captivity of the Church, he rejected ordination as a sacrament that conferred a special grace upon the priest. Instead, “all of us that have been baptized are equally priests,” (LW 36:112) and therefore “we have the same power in respect to the Word and the sacrament” (LW 36:116) as the ordained priest. Finally, Luther closes the loop in his Freedom of a Christian. If we are all priests because of baptism and if we all have the same power with respect to Word and Sacrament, then any one of us could serve as pastor, though not everyone should. “Although we are all equally priests, we cannot all publicly minister and teach. We ought not even if we could” (LW 31:356). What can be—and was—misleading about these statements is that Luther appears to reject the long-established tradition of an ordained priesthood. At least, that’s what his critics alleged. One in particular, the German Catholic theologian Jerome Emser, engaged Luther in a series of heated written debates in early 1521—around the time of Luther’s excommunication itself and preceding his appearance at the Diet of Worms. Emser tried to distinguish between two priesthoods—one spiritual and one ecclesiastical. The spiritual priesthood belonged to all Christians, but the ecclesiastical priesthood only to the ordained clergy. For Luther, this misunderstood what the New Testament actually said about the priesthood. There is only one priesthood, and, according to 1 Peter 2, that priesthood belongs to all believers. What the opponents mean by priest is the office of the ministry, yet the New Testament never refers to the pastoral office as the priesthood. It uses many other terms for it (“ministry,” “servitude,” “dispensation,” “episcopate,” and “presbytery”), but not priest. Luther adds, “But no one should be surprised that bishop, pastor, priest, chaplain, cathedral dean, monk, and many similar names have different meanings now, since no word of Scripture has retained its true meaning. That is why God and his Scripture do not know the present bishops. The spiritual estate has been established and ordered by men’s laws and regulations in such a way, and has become so deeply entrenched in the course of time, that one thinks it is founded on Scripture” (LW 39:155). Luther later clarified his point further in another response to Emser, who had contended that 1 Peter 2:6-10 refers to both a spiritual priesthood of all Christians and a physical priesthood of the clergy. Luther, surprisingly, agreed with this—in a sense. He had always held that there was one priesthood, but in that priesthood “not all should be consecrated by bishops, not all should preach, celebrate mass, and exercise the priestly office unless they have been appointed and called to do so” (LW 39:233). There is only one priesthood, but—as he had argued earlier in his writings—this entire priesthood of believers cannot all occupy the pastoral office. “To exercise such power and to put it to work is not every man’s business. Only he who is called by the common assembly, or the man representing the assembly’s order and will, does this work in the stead of and as the representative of the common assembly and power” (LW 39:237). To his opponents, Luther had used this definition of the priesthood to replace ordained priests with the laity. To Luther’s mind, he had not replaced ordained clergy with laity, but an unbiblical notion of the priesthood with a biblical notion of the priesthood. The pastoral office and the priesthood were not the same thing according to Scripture and should not be confused. What Luther never intended was to create an opposition between the ordained clergy occupying the pastoral office and the lay priesthood of believers, yet that has somehow become the legacy of his views. It has almost become customary within Lutheranism to pit pastor and laity against one another, to frame the relationship as a power struggle between the congregation and the clergy, between the called pastor and the voters meeting that called him. We make the same mistake as Emser and Luther’s opponents, however, if we think along these lines. The universal priesthood, or priesthood of all believers, really isn’t about the priesthood at all. It is not about which powers belong to the congregation and which belong to the pastors, who has authority in the church, how a pastor is called, or anything of the like. These questions only predominate in an American religious context obsessed with the separation of powers, checks and balances, popular sovereignty—in short, with constitutional democracy. That is not what drove Luther and that is not what he means by the priesthood. For Luther, redefining the priesthood is not about the priesthood of believers at all, but about what Scripture has given clergy to do so that they can do just that. He sought to clarify a biblical misunderstanding of the priesthood that had led to a concomitant misunderstanding of the pastoral office, what pastors were, what made them pastors, and what pastors were supposed to do. The use of the word pastor itself is instructive. It refers to the image of the shepherd who cares for his sheep, as Christ the Good Shepherd does (John 10; 1 Peter 5:1-4). This image came, however, from the medieval notion of the care of souls (“cura animarum” in Latin, translated as “Seelsorge” in German), which meant an ordained clergyman serving a parish by performing the rites of the church—baptism, confession, communion, marriage, burial. This was the biblical model for the congregational pastor. Luther did not want to reject the pastoral office or make every Christian a pastor; he wanted to return to the New Testament notion of clergy present among their people caring for their spiritual needs through the ministry of Word and Sacrament. That is how we must understand the pastoral office today. It has nothing to do with a power struggle between pastor and people or with who exercises authority over whom in the church. It has nothing to do with elevating one over the other or opposing them to each other. Instead, it has everything to do with pastors present amongst their people preaching them the Word, hearing their confessions, absolving their sins, baptizing sinners in their midst, feeding them with Christ’s body and blood, teaching them the faith, and marrying and burying them in that faith. As Lutherans, that means doing so not only in accordance with Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions, but in such a way that what we believe as Lutherans unmistakably comes to bear upon our care of the souls entrusted to us. This is what the laity should expect, even demand of their clergy—not that their pastors think just like them or do what they say or make the church big or successful, but that they would provide them faithful pastoral care as Lutheran clergy serving Lutherans in need of that care. We have been trained and called within a tradition built upon precisely this kind of pastoral care for the people. We are pastors serving people—the “royal priesthood”—with the things they most need: a Word that justifies, a baptism that saves, an absolution that restores, a sacrament that forgives. Luther did not seek to change the pastoral office, but to remind it what the Scriptures say it is and what the Scriptures urge it to do. That’s all a congregation can ask of its pastor; that’s all you as pastors can ask of yourselves. This is the next in a monthly series of articles requested by the New Jersey District President commemorating anniversaries of particular writings or events in the life of Martin Luther. They are intended to introduce the historical background and theological content and implications of those writings or events, as well as raise questions about how they might pertain to consciously Lutheran parish ministry in twenty-first century America. The purpose is not to provide answers to these difficult questions, but to provoke reflection, personally or jointly, on how Luther’s life and thought relate to the challenges facing us.
When the earliest Lutherans reformed the practices of medieval Christianity, they did it with one goal in mind: to remove any obstacles to rightly understanding the gospel that Christ saves us through faith in him and what he has done for us. It’s not that Luther and his colleagues found the medieval liturgy boring or unmeaningful. It’s not that they wanted the church to adapt to the times. It’s not that they were trying to reach a changing culture, let alone trying to change culture itself. It’s not even that they believed worship had to be biblical in the sense of adhering to what was specifically prescribed in Scripture—that was the position of their Reformed Protestant opponents. Simply put, they wanted the practices of the church to be more biblically and theologically sound, so as not to mislead Christians in a way that was harmful to their faith. Instead, they would be instructed through Christian worship to understand the faith rightly, and in turn that would lead them to practicing their Christianity rightly and believing in Christ rightly. Everything those Lutherans changed about the life of the church—whether that was new liturgies, new hymns, new catechisms, the way they preached or sang or prayed—had to do with what those practices communicated about the faith. In his 1521 sermon, “The Three Kinds of the Good Life for the Instruction of Christian Consciences,” Martin Luther shows that the proper end of all Christian life is a right saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and what he has done. That, in turn, should shape what Christians do. Of course, the premise for the sermon is the ancient philosopher Aristotle’s description of the “good life.” The purpose, end, goal, or “telos,” of human life for Aristotle was “eudaimonia”—“happiness,” but in our terms something more like true fulfillment of human potential. In Aristotelian ethics, that meant learning and improving so that one might act and live virtuously. For Luther and other critics of medieval Christianity, much of the Christian life had become simply adhering to certain rules—attending Mass, saying prayers, fasting from certain foods, taking certain vows—rather than reaching the true apex of Christianity: the knowledge of Christ and his promise of salvation. Rather than external principles for how one should live, thinkers like Luther wanted Christians to move beyond the typical medieval customs to a more fervent faith in Christ, and that would come only with proper instruction in what they were to believe. Luther uses “The Three Kinds of the Good Life” to provide that proper instruction, yet he does so in a way that might not resonate with those of us who are unfamiliar with medieval Christianity. Luther lays out the three kinds of good life through an analogy to church architecture: the churchyard, the nave, and the sanctuary. The churchyard symbolizes the externals of medieval Christianity, things like the Mass, fasting, vows, etc. For Luther, these practices are built on an improper view of justification by faith, so you have to leave the churchyard and move into the nave in order to get past this misunderstanding. The nave symbolizes the true good works of the Christian life. While medieval practices were built upon wrong assumptions, these true good works are derived from Scripture itself. He doesn’t confuse works with righteousness before God, but rightly understands works as biblical virtues that God himself prescribes for the believer: “humility, meekness, gentleness, peace, fidelity, love, propriety, purity, and the like” (LW 44:239). Yet the Christian must not remain in the nave; the goal is to reach the sanctuary, the “holy of holies.” The sanctuary represents the heart of saving faith in the gospel: “Here he has set Christ before us and promised that he who believes in him and calls on his name shall at once receive the Holy Spirit” (LW 44:241). The sanctuary holds the ultimate goal of the good Christian life, for it offers everlasting salvation. What we must not miss in Luther’s argument, though, is that that all three of these relate to the good life: externals, good works, and faith in Christ. The churchyard, the nave, and the sanctuary are all part of the church, even if there is a clear order of importance. Given the context, Luther has very little positive to say about externals, chiefly because so many abuses of his day had come to detract from the gospel. He wants to encourage virtuous living according to Holy Scripture rather than works based upon our “own choice,” as the Formula of Concord puts it when it defends the third use of the law (Solid Declaration 7.20; Kolb/Wengert, 590). Even more significant than obeying God’s law is to arrive at a knowledge of Christ and his forgiveness which the Holy Spirit inspires in our hearts—though Luther cautions us against contrasting the two: “A preacher should not try to separate the two, although he should push faith to the fore” (LW 44:242). Ultimately, all three—externals, good works and faith in Christ—are fundamental parts of what it means to live out the good life as a Christian, just as the churchyard, the nave, and the sanctuary are fundamental parts of the church. The goal is that we understand them correctly and put them in a right relation to each other. Luther’s “The Three Kinds of the Good Life,” is, in a word, about doctrine. Indeed, that’s why the extended title is “The Three Kinds of the Good Life for the Instruction of Consciences.” Luther wants these ways of living and worshipping as Christians to be shaped by a biblical understanding of the faith. He isn’t rejecting externals any more than he is rejecting good works; he is rejecting externals that lead to a false works-righteousness, in the same way that he criticizes any false confidence that our good works themselves will justify us before God. The problem isn’t the externals, let alone the good works—the problem is the misunderstanding of the externals and the works. For Luther, a right understanding of the Christian faith as revealed in Holy Scripture, and above all the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, should shape all that we do in the church and how we live as Christians. This is precisely how Luther will approach the reform of the liturgy during the Reformation. He doesn’t belittle worship as merely an “external.” He instead uses the liturgy to instruct the people in the faith by eliminating anything that obscures the gospel or is inconsistent with Scripture. In his very conservative 1523 reform of the Latin Mass, he simply removed elements that contradicted Scripture or justification by faith, such as the liturgy and prayers associated with consecrating the Sacrament of the Altar, known as the “Canon of the Mass.” Likewise, in his 1526 German Mass, though Luther went farther in terms of reforming the liturgy, he prefaced it by saying that what the German service needed first of all was a “plain and simple, fair and square catechism,” that is, a means of instruction in Christian doctrine so that the faithful will know the faith expressed in their corporate worship (LW 53:64). He then proceeds to lay out a service in the vernacular—in this case, German—so that the common person may better understand the worship and the Word taught throughout it. The Augsburg Confession and the Apology later pick up on this same tack. They do not reject or denigrate worship as useless external forms, but instead say they are of great benefit for, among other things, the purpose of instruction: “Ceremonies should be observed both so that people may learn the Scriptures and so that, admonished by the Word, they might experience faith and fear and finally even pray. For these are the purposes of the ceremonies” (Apology 24.3; Kolb/Wengert, 258). Note the order: first the external ceremonies, and then through the Word in the ceremonies comes faith, fear, and prayer—those things that relate to embracing the promise of Christ and his forgiveness. For Luther, as well as later Lutherans, externals such as worship were not disregarded, but were to be understood properly—that is, not as a means to please God or earn justification, but rather as a means through which God instructs his people in his Word, so that they might fear, trust, and love him rightly. Is that how we view externals, especially corporate worship? Are they vehicles for God’s Word to come to us so that we might obey him with our lives and believe in his promises? Or have they become objects we manipulate to get the intended effect, the religious version of stage lighting on a speaker or mood music in a film? Do we use our worship to create a certain atmosphere (it makes no difference whether you do it with a choir and organ or with a praise band), to affect people emotionally or evoke a reaction? If so, we have wandered far from Luther’s understanding of externals and their relationship to living out consciously Christian lives. Worship, for Luther, for the confessions, and even for us, isn’t about personal experience or a sense of mystery or an emotional connection, nor is it about musical precision or stage performance. It isn’t even about long-established liturgical tradition. Most especially, it isn’t about us at all and what we seek to do through it. It is rather about what God does through it in his Word. It is about communicating biblical truth. It is about the Word of God coming to the people through Scripture and sermon and sacrament. It is about the Word preached and taught purely and the sacraments administered rightly, for through them—as through means—the Holy Spirit is at work among us, convicting sinners of their sins, granting sinners faith to believe in the gospel where there is no faith, and sustaining faith in the gospel where there is already saving faith (Augsburg Confession 5). Luther did not reject externals, for provided they were understood rightly, they became instruments for instruction of the faithful. They were rather one step leading toward the good life of the Christian, to the “unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Eph. 4:13-14). This is the next in a monthly series of articles requested by the New Jersey District President commemorating anniversaries of particular writings or events in the life of Martin Luther. They are intended to introduce the historical background and theological content and implications of those writings or events, as well as raise questions about how they might pertain to consciously Lutheran parish ministry in twenty-first century America. The purpose is not to provide answers to these difficult questions, but to provoke reflection, personally or jointly, on how Luther’s life and thought relate to the challenges facing us.
On December 10, 1520, Martin Luther and a group of students burned the papal bull “Exsurge Domine.” The bull (a term referring to the seal placed upon an official letter) had threatened Luther with excommunication if he did not recant of the errors listed in it. He had sixty days upon receiving the bull to comply or be excommunicated. On that sixtieth day, he joined students and faculty from the university in Wittenberg as they gathered at the Chapel of the Holy Cross around 9:00 in the morning. Luther planned this theatrical display as a response to a burning of his books in Leipzig that never happened. First on the pile were books of canon law and later papal decrees, then the books of many other medieval theologians or critics of Luther. (Strangely enough, no one could part with the writings of Thomas Aquinas—they remained.) Luther placed Exsurge Domine on the flaming pile last. Afterwards, the students staged a funeral rite for canon law, complete with a procession, more book burnings, and even accompanying songs. Canon law, so to speak, was dead to the earliest Lutherans that day. That doesn’t tell the whole story, though, of why Luther and his students rejected canon law, nor how we as Lutherans have come to replace canon law with something that serves the same function even to this day. For modern Lutherans, canon law might as well be a lost planet. We don’t know much about it. You won’t hear anything about it outside of a church history class, and even then it is usually referred to in a pejorative fashion. At the time of the Reformation, though, canon law was an umbrella term for several different things. The first was the so-called “Decretum Gratiani” (also known as “The Concordance of Discordant Canons”), collated by a twelfth century monk and professor, Gratian of Bologna. In it, Gratian organized many of the disciplinary canons included in early church councils and synods that sought to regulate life amongst the clergy. By comparing and contrasting them, he synthesized the various rules in such a way that the clergy of his day would have a clearer understanding of how the church and its ministries should function. The second, and more problematic to Luther’s mind, were the books of papal decretals. There were at least six of these, ranging from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. While Gratian’s Decretum brought together mostly ancient canons, these papal decretals were pronouncements of sitting popes in the most recent centuries, meaning they were not only fairly new, but also published by popes at the height of their power and influence. What we find in the debate over Luther’s view of indulgences from 1517 to 1521 is that his opponents primarily used these later papal decretals rather than the earlier canons to denounce Luther’s positions, and they did so on the basis of papal authority rather than the canons and councils of the early church. We have to understand Luther’s criticism—and ultimate rejection—of canon law in this light. In the early days of the Reformation, Luther repeatedly defended his right to criticize indulgences due to the fact that no council had officially recognized them. His opponents, in turn, responded that various papal pronouncements collected in the later decretals of canon law, as well as other subsequent papal decrees, had promulgated indulgences and that those popes had the right to do so because of their office. In order to better understand these arguments, Luther began to study canon law more closely and this led him to assert famously that papal authority had been built not upon Scripture, ancient councils, or the first eleven centuries of church history, but rather upon the decrees of popes in the preceding four-hundred years. At the Leipzig Debate in 1519, he dismissed the notion that canon law, popes, or even councils were infallible, claiming that Scripture alone was beyond human error. As a doctor of theology responsible for teaching and preaching Holy Scripture, Luther believed the clear doctrine of the Bible could not be overturned by fallible human authority, including papal decretals of recent vintage. Yet, there Luther stood in December 1520, with his teachings condemned by a papal bull behind the authority of canon law. Exsurge Domine, completed in June 1520 after nearly six months of negotiations, listed 41 specific errors of Luther (mostly supplied by his debate opponent at Leipzig, John Eck). It condemns Luther’s teaching and those who espouse his teaching. It prohibits any and all use of Luther’s writings. It gives Luther—and all those associated with him—sixty days to provide legal documentation that they recant of their errors, or simply to present themselves in Rome as a sign of repentance. Rome handed John Eck the responsibility of delivering the bull to Wittenberg, but Eck sent a courier to do so on October 3. Luther officially received it on October 10, thereby starting the sixty-day clock that expired when Luther tossed the letter on the bonfire of canon law. Because of his resistance, the bull “Decet Romanum Pontificem” officially excommunicated him in January 1521. During this period, Luther wrote numerous responses to the bull, but none more notable than his December tract, “Why the Books of the Pope and His Disciples Were Burned,” drafted in the two weeks after the event. First, Luther lays out several reasons why the books were burned. His principal contention is that as a “sworn doctor of Holy Scripture” with a responsibility to “destroy, or at least to ward off false, corrupt, unchristian doctrine,” he could not abide by misleading teachings imposed on the faithful by the authority of popes (LW 31:383). The bull and other writings of Rome had contradicted the Scriptures, and thus, he was “duty-bound” (31:384) to point out those errors and protect others from their seduction. Then, in much the same fashion as Exsurge Domine had listed his 41 alleged errors, Luther proceeded to note thirty errors of canon law and papal decrees “on account of which they are rightly to be burned and shunned” (31:385). Nearly all were taken directly from either Gratian’s Decretum or the later collections of decretals. In some cases, he made no comment; in others, a brief note. But in several instances, he offered an extended rationale for why that particular statement was wrong. Luther’s point, however, was not to debate the merits of canon law or to get into the weeds of canon law interpretation. On the contrary, he sought to point out an underlying problem, no better said than in his final identification of canon law’s errors: “The pope does not derive authentic existence, strength, and dignity from Scripture, but Scripture from him, which is one of the main articles” (31:392). The problem was that papal authority—and the canon law supporting it—had overtaken Scripture as the principal doctrinal authority in the church. Luther denounced canon law, burned the papal bull, refused to recant of his teaching, and accepted excommunication because the truths of Scripture had been traded for alternate truths established strictly by the fiat of popes. It is exceptionally important to bear in mind that Luther had no interest in rejecting church authority. As a graduated doctor of theology teaching at a university chartered by the pope, he was part of that church authority. He pledged to teach, preach, and uphold the doctrine of the church. Yet where that stated doctrine contradicted Holy Scripture, he was conscience-bound to speak against it. For Luther, this is not a question of accepting or rejecting church authority; it is a question of accepting or rejecting Scriptural truth. Where church authority upholds the teachings of Holy Scripture, then the church is well within its right to exercise its authority in defense of that doctrine and to maintain order and discipline within its membership. Where Scripture does not speak, then the church may establish and even enforce certain things by human right, that is, according to its best judgment. Yet it may not and should not impose human opinion as if it were biblical truth, and it absolutely must not reject biblical truth in favor of human opinion. But our problem as Lutherans isn’t church authority, human opinion, or even canon law. The problem comes when those things are passed off as divinely revealed truth or, worse still, when they contradict or replace Scripture. That’s when the bonfire gets started (metaphorically speaking, of course). In and of themselves, though, church authority, human opinion, and canon law are fine, useful instruments that can be of great benefit to us. Lutherans intuitively understood this in ages past. During Luther’s own lifetime, Lutherans drafted legally enforceable church orders for use in territories adopting the Reformation, and they did so in order that the churches there might have some basic guidance in how to conduct their worship, instruct their young, marry their people, and provide for those in need. Later Lutherans developed “church laws” (Kirchenrechten) to regulate all ecclesiastical and civil matters in Protestant lands. When nineteenth-century Lutherans in America began to form synods, like our own, they did so by drafting constitutions, which stipulated what their people believed and how they were to be organized. When they finally incorporated under state law, they expanded those constitutions to include bylaws governing how they were to operate denominationally. No one accused them of imposing a new canon law or enforcing human opinion or using coercive authority. On the contrary, everyone recognized that this was the necessary, left-handed exercise of reason in support of the church by helping it to function practically, neatly, efficiently, and—yes—legally. When it comes to participating in our denomination today, however, many seem unwilling to grant that. We deprecatingly refer to Synod as merely advisory and to our synodical constitution and bylaws as canon law—and that’s true, in a sense. But it also isn’t a bad thing. Since the foundation of our denomination, Synod has only ever claimed for itself the power of the Word of God and the power of persuasion. The first of these is the true authority in the church; the second is how we deal with one another when there is no direct word of Scripture. This persuasion happens through theological publications, collegial conversation, circuit forums, district convocations, and synodical conventions before making its way into constitutions and bylaws—our version of canon law. The end-result is a fundamentally good thing. It helps us do what we are called to do as the church “decently and in good order” (1 Corinthians 14:40). In no way, shape, or form does that mean doing things this way is necessary, let alone necessary for salvation. The way we have chosen to operate and carry out our business should never be a burden on consciences, nor may it ever replace, contradict, or reject Holy Scripture. When it does, then it becomes “antichrist” in the broad sense of the term and must be rejected. Constitutions and bylaws, canon law, and church authority do not make the church what it is; faith wrought by the Holy Spirit through Word and Sacrament does. Nevertheless, they serve a useful function: they enable us to organize ourselves in a way that is consistent with what Scripture says yet takes advantage of the best resources our left-handed human reason can offer. When they replace, contradict, or reject Scripture, then we must replace, contradict, or reject them. We can even burn them, as Luther did, if we wish. Where they are consistent with and supportive of Scripture, though, where they help us organize ourselves “decently and good order,” where they facilitate harmony and peace, where they enable us to engage in civil yet meaningful dialogue, they should be embraced as created gifts to be used in service to the ministry of Word and Sacrament. This is the next in a monthly series of articles requested by the New Jersey District President commemorating anniversaries of particular writings or events in the life of Martin Luther. They are intended to introduce the historical background and theological content and implications of those writings or events, as well as raise questions about how they might pertain to consciously Lutheran parish ministry in twenty-first century America. The purpose is not to provide answers to these difficult questions, but to provoke reflection, personally or jointly, on how Luther’s life and thought relate to the challenges facing us.
As a culture, we premise everything on the notion of rights. Our political system, our economic system, our legal system are all derived from the right of the individual to exercise one’s vote, speak one’s mind, practice one’s religion, and make one’s money. In a sense, we have almost descended into the abyss of competing rights. Each side of our culture wars claims you can’t make them do “this” [insert “wear a mask,” “get an ID,” “keep the pregnancy,” “pay taxes,” or “get a vaccine”]. That may be the way that our culture operates, and there may even be a certain truth to those arguments in the civil realm of a constitutional democracy. But when it comes to the church, to fellow Christians, and maybe especially to brother pastors, that simply is not the image the Scriptures give us. The image of the Scriptures is one of mutual submission, of Christians not asserting their independence, but binding themselves to one another in a common faith, hope, and love. The image of the Scriptures is one of concern for our brothers and sisters in Christ, for our brother pastors, not seeking to serve ourselves and what we want, but those with whom we share a “unity of the sprit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3). It is this principle Martin Luther expresses in his November 1520 “Freedom of a Christian,” a surprisingly irenic, balanced treatment of the role of good works in the life of the justified. The reason Luther writes this treatise is to respond to objections he is almost certain to receive from critics of his new understanding of justification. In the previous year or so, Luther had increasingly begun to speak of justification by faith, and how that faith should inform everything from our worship and the reform of the church to our Christian lives. But a likely objection still remained: If we need not perform good works in order to merit eternal life, then what motivation will we have to live according to God’s law? Medieval views of justification had long taught the principle of “faith formed by love” (in Latin, “fides caritate formata”), which meant that it was not enough to believe in the gospel if our faith did not lead to acts of love, that is, obedience to the Scriptures. In the Middle Ages, faith did not indicate a trust in the promises of God, or “fiducia,” but “historica”—an assent to the truth of what the canonical Gospels say about Jesus, but without any effect upon the believer’s life. Luther rejected this notion, speaking more of the gospel as a promise of forgiveness through Christ that is received by faith—a confident trust that what Christ says in his Word he will do for me. Luther never envisioned this faith as excusing one from living in accordance with God’s Word and the commands laid down therein. On the contrary, drawing heavily upon Romans and Galatians, faith means freedom from the bondage of sin to serve fellow Christians according to the law of love—not out of compulsion, but as a response to the gracious gift Christ offers in the gospel. To that end, Luther’s treatise includes what has become a famous twofold proposition: “The Christian man is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. The Christian man is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all” (LW 31:344) The first proposition relates to the “spiritual, new, inner, and inner man”—to our standing before God (“coram Deo”). This “spiritual, new, inner, and inner man” is now defined by justifying faith. Luther distinguishes between three different functions of this faith that renews and liberates us. First, faith receives the Word, believes it, and is justified. This faith depends upon the preached Word so that it may believe. It is for this reason, then, that the clergy, or spiritual estate, was instituted for the ministry of the Word, that the hearers may have something to believe. Second, faith honors the one whom it trusts. That means faith honors the Christ who promises forgiveness, and it honors Christ by worshipping and believing in him alone. Third, faith unites the soul with Christ as its bridegroom. It is in this context that Luther uses the notable phrase “happy exchange” to describe the union between the believer and Christ, the bridegroom: Christ takes upon himself the believer’s sin, while the believer receives the royalty that is Christ’s alone. This in turn makes the Christian a “free lord of all, subject to none”: the Christian is now greater than human royalty because he or she has the divine royalty of Christ. The same rationale holds for the distinction between clergy and laity. There is no longer a spiritual distinction between clergy and other Christians, but by virtue of their baptisms all are priests and lords. What separates the clergy from the laity is merely their responsibility to proclaim the Word, so that the people may have something to believe. The second proposition Luther lays out does not contradict the first, but complements it, even follows from it. Now he is dealing with the “outer man”—with the life of the believer that flows from saving faith. He argues that these works of the Christian do not save; faith alone does. However, the works Christians do reflect what Christ himself has done for them. Like fruit from a tree, the believer’s faith gives rise to good works—not because they must be done in order to be justified, but as a response to what Christ has done. Luther explicitly patterns this after the language of Philippians 2: “Although the Christian is thus free from all works, he ought in this liberty to empty himself, take upon himself the form of a servant, be made in the likeness of men, be found in human form, and to serve, help, and in every way deal with his neighbor as he sees that God through Christ has dealt and still deals with him. This he should do freely, having regard for nothing but divine approval” (LW 31:75) The problem for Luther was never the need for the Christian to do works. As the Formula of Concord says: “Good works are necessary” (FC IV.14). The problem for Luther—as for the Confessions—comes when Christians trust those works to save them. Once justification by faith frees us from the need to save ourselves, we are free to submit to our neighbor in works of love and service. The Christian freed from the condemnation of sin in fact should exemplify the command to love God and neighbor as oneself. “We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor” (LW 31:80). Lutherans generally do not struggle with the first proposition of Luther’s “Freedom of a Christian.” Due to the painstaking labors of Luther, the Lutheran confessors, and our own Missouri Synod predecessors, we can’t help but get justification right. It is the second proposition that tends to cause problems for American Lutherans, steeped in rabid individualism and its language of rights. Nearly everything we breathe in our religious air is modified by the first-person, singular possessive pronoun: “my” faith, “my” church, “my” offering, “my” ministry. The last one indicts clergy particularly. We isolate ourselves from our fellow clergy, do things the way we want to do them regardless what anyone else thinks or says, and neglect the brotherly conversation, sharpening, and rapport that should be ours as co-laborers in the ministry of Word and Sacrament. When we ignore the concerns and cares of our brothers in the ministry, we reduce the ministries Christ has entrusted to us to little more than individualistic occupations or expressions our distinctive personalities. This does our congregations no favors, I might add. We grow overly dependent upon the congregants we serve for moral and emotional support to the degree that we exhaust them rather than provide for them. One area where this independence and isolation has long bedeviled us is the practice of adiaphora: “things indifferent,” those things which Scripture neither prohibits nor commands, yet we are free to practice in Christian liberty. Worship practices usually receive the most attention in this respect, though it applies just as readily to all sorts of pastoral, congregational, and denominational matters. When it comes to the responsible exercise of adiaphora, the principle of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians should govern what we do: “Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor” (1 Cor. 10:24). Or, as the Apostle says in Romans, “So then let us pursue what makes for peace and mutual upbuilding” (Romans 14:19). For St. Paul, what matters less is the right you have to do something—in these cases, religious observances or dietary customs—than the effect it has upon your neighbor. That is the concern that should shape how we view our relationship with others in the church. How do the ways I worship, the ways I practice pastoral ministry, and the decisions I make in my congregation impact my neighboring pastor or neighboring congregation? How can I best take into account my brother pastor and what he needs rather than myself and what I want or need? The responsible practice of adiaphora, whether that is in worship styles, congregational decisions, or pastoral ministry, does not celebrate our freedom to do what we wish, but binds us to our fellow pastors and congregations, as if they mattered as much—or more—than me and what I want to do. If we fail to take others into account, then we actually misuse the Scriptural freedom we have in adiaphora by potentially causing harm to those with whom we should have the most in common. This is but one of a whole host of applications we could make from Luther’s “Freedom of a Christian.” Ultimately, though, it relates to how we responsibly live in light of what Christ has given us. We have no problem when it comes to the first proposition: “The Christian man is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.” We are free on account of our faith in Jesus Christ and what he has done for us—free from the condemnation of the law, free from the onerous demands of the Old Testament sacrificial and ceremonial regulations, free from the ultimate consequence of our sin, free from hell and eternal death. Realizing the implications of the second is much harder: “The Christian man is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” How do we live as if we were “servant of all” and “subject to all”? How do we “count others more significant than ourselves” (Phil. 2:3)? How do we submit “to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21)? In his famous 1974 commencement address, the eminent Russian refugee Alexander Solzhenitsyn suggested that it may be time “to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.” It may be time for us to spend less effort defending our freedom as Christian pastors and more effort considering our obligations as Christian pastors to one another. The language of our rights rather than our responsibilities toward one another has not served us well; it is the equivalent of taking Luther’s first proposition and ignoring the second. Indeed, as our culture eats itself alive over politics, race, gender, sexuality, and healthcare, it would behoove us to act less like them—fighting for our right to do and say whatever we want—and more like the Christ who did not defend his rights, but died a death he did not deserve for sins he did not commit, “who humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8). That is where true Christian freedom begins, and it can only lead us to love and serve our neighbor as ourselves. This is the next in a monthly series of articles requested by the New Jersey District President commemorating anniversaries of particular writings or events in the life of Martin Luther. They are intended to introduce the historical background and theological content and implications of those writings or events, as well as raise questions about how they might pertain to consciously Lutheran parish ministry in twenty-first century America. The purpose is not to provide answers to these difficult questions, but to provoke reflection, personally or jointly, on how Luther’s life and thought relate to the challenges facing us.
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised many questions for us these last few months, but there may be no more prominent one than this: Why do we go to church? In some sense, the great fear of many a pastor is that Pandora’s Box has been opened. Once people don’t need to attend worship on a regular basis to hear the Word and receive the sacraments, will they ever come back? If parishioners can comfortably access the worship of the church—indeed, the worship of many different congregations and denominations—through a live (let alone recorded) digital feed, why would they have to attend again? And why would they attend with anything like the consistency they once did? Within Lutheran theology there are a host of ways to respond to this, but one of them in particular can be found in Luther’s own understanding of the sacraments: that through the physical, tangible, visible elements of water and bread and wine, Christ comes to us and speaks his Word and gives us the grace we can find nowhere else but in Him. Luther makes this clear in his magnificent sacramental reform treatise of October 1520, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church” (LW 36:3-126). The harsh title of this treatise actually predates Luther, going back to the fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch of Florence, who alleged that the residence of the papacy in Avignon, France—from 1309 to 1377—rather than in Rome signified a “Babylonian captivity” of the papacy. But Luther applies Petrarch’s humanist rhetoric to the sacramental theology of the Middle Ages that the early Reformation sought to purify of certain problematic assumptions. It is important first to understand what the medieval practice of the sacraments looked like. Beginning with the twelfth century, both scholastic theology and canon law came to redefine the sacraments as sevenfold: baptism, penance, Eucharist, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, and extreme unction, or last rites. The theological rationale for this held that Christians required grace at all phases of life to enable them to excel morally and ultimately merit eternal life. This in turn meant the sacraments were the literal “means of grace” through which salvation was possible, and thus they needed to drink from those wells continually. It was in this sense that the Latin term “ex opere operato” developed its currency—one need only receive the objective sacrament in order to obtain the grace it offered. At the same time, it created a problem: by objectifying the grace of the sacraments, the necessity of faith receded into the background. Medieval theology worked with a very different understanding of grace than Luther later did. Grace in scholastic theology took on the character of a substance. In some sense, this dates back to Augustine of Hippo, who taught that grace was “infused” into the Christian almost as if it were a liquid. Medieval theologians adopted this and the church urged the faithful to receive that objective substance called grace, which was infused into them through the sacraments. For Luther, however, grace is not a substance, but a declaration—a declaration of God’s forgiveness made possible through the suffering and death of Christ. It didn’t get infused into you, but was something pronounced to you, and it was pronounced in the oral proclamation of the sermon or absolution, in the tangible reception of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Through those “as through means” (Augsburg Confession V), God declared his forgiveness that the sinner might receive it in faith. When Luther writes his treatise on the comprehensive reform of the sacraments, then, he uses this latter definition of grace to reconcile the doctrine of justification by faith with sacramental theology and practice. It wasn’t enough simply to add justifying faith to the equation: he needed to show how the sacraments were received in faith, and the missing link he supplied to that end was the objective declaration of grace in God’s Word. Luther essentially redefines the sacraments in this treatise to be instruments through which the Word is proclaimed in order to create and sustain faith in the believer. Anything that distracted from or obscured that Word, anything that led one to believe the sacraments were works to be done or superstitious magic to be practiced, anything that detracted from God’s gracious proclamation of forgiveness through Christ had to change, and change quickly. In Luther’s treatise, he completely reforms the theology of the sacraments in accord with this redefinition. No longer are there seven sacraments through which grace is infused into the believer for the purpose of moral effort and meriting eternal life. On the contrary, there are three sacraments—or, as he puts it, “one single sacrament, but with three sacramental signs” (LW 36:18)—that declare the mercy of God to the sinner: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and penance, or confession and absolution. Whereas the liturgical ceremonies of confirmation, marriage, ordination, and last rites are all in varying ways useful opportunities to sanctify the life of the Christian through the Word of God and prayer, none promise grace to the believer, none explicitly announce the forgiveness of sins on account of Christ’s work, and none are truly sacraments, as Luther defines the term. The Lord’s Supper provides the clearest and most significant example of this reform. Luther decries how Holy Communion has been turned into a supernatural potion or public spectacle. This has taken away from the promise of Christ and the forgiveness the Lord institutes this sacrament to offer. He targets three abuses in particular: the sacrifice of the mass, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the withholding of the cup from the laity. What do all three have in common? They detract from the declaration of grace at the heart of this sacrament. The sacrifice of the mass meant that attention was placed on the priest correctly “performing” the mass rather than on the believer receiving it in faith for the forgiveness of sins. The doctrine of transubstantiation placed the focus on how the bread and wine became the Body and Blood of Christ rather than on what that Christ offered the believer through the sacrament. The withholding of the cup from the laity distorted the words of institution by depriving the believer of one of the elements through which Christ sought to strengthen faith and forgive sins. In every case, the promise of God’s gracious forgiveness delivered in the Word took a backseat to something else. The medieval theology of the Eucharist obscured the Word and promise of Christ. Luther wanted to insure that remained central. It is safe to say American Lutherans today have little patience for those sixteenth-century debates. We believe that Christ is present in the sacrament. We believe that Christ is present according to his Word. We believe that Christ declares his promise of forgiveness through that Word. We believe that this forgiveness is ours because of our faith in Christ and what he has done for us. We believe that the Sacrament of the Altar delivers this forgiveness to us through the Body and Blood of Christ and that we receive it by faith. In a sense, this has all become so customary for us that we almost take it for granted. What other explanation could there possibly be for us to even countenance the notion that church attendance is optional, voluntary, unnecessary? But that is exactly the danger that has reared its head in the days of COVID-19 and the transformation of the digital medium as the primary, if not sole, method of worship for many. And if that is the case, then it represents a downright failure on our part to rightly understand and communicate the role of the sacraments in the life of the church. Baptism, the Sacrament of the Altar, confession and absolution are the Scripturally and divinely appointed means through which the Word of God is at work in our lives. Through them, our gracious Lord physically, tangibly, and visibly impresses upon us his Word, his gracious deliverance from sin, his promise not to hold our sins against us on account of his suffering and death. The reason for attending Christian worship is not only to hear that Word, which admittedly can and does come to us through digital means (albeit without the pastoral care that has always accompanied preaching of the Word, thereby reducing it to the equivalent of 1980s televangelism—and us to 1980s televangelists). We also attend worship in order that Christ might use these physical, tangible, visible instruments of his grace to impress his truth upon the senses he has given us. As Luther says in his Lectures on Genesis, “God in His divine wisdom arranges to manifest Himself to human beings by some definite and visible form which can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands, in short, is within the scope of the five senses” (LW 3:109). We are simply not wired to think that way in America, especially after the dawn of the digital age. Christianity has become a spectator sport. The questions we ask about worship can often have precious little do with what God offers us through his appointed means. Our questions are different. Was the pastor funny? Was he engaging? Did he speak well? How was the music? Did it move me emotionally? Do I like the people there? How early did I have to get up? How far did I have to drive? How long was the service? Did I get out in time for the game? Did it conflict with my social schedule or my vacation schedule or my weekend schedule? If these are the questions people ask, the next logical question can only be: Can I watch it from the comfort of my own home? And that’s a problem. It is a problem because Christian worship has far less to do with how I feel about it and what I get out of it and how it suits me than what Jesus Christ so graciously and concretely offers us there: the forgiveness of sins for which he suffered that bloody, gruesome, sacrificial death upon the cross, the forgiveness of sins that he offers to repentant sinners who receive his Word in faith, the forgiveness of sins he gives to you his people physically, tangibly, and visibly in that sacraments he has instituted for you. You will only find those sacraments in the church Christ has given for you and against which he promises the gates of hell will not prevail (Matt. 16:18)—let alone COVID-19. This is the next in a monthly series of articles requested by the New Jersey District President commemorating anniversaries of particular writings or events in the life of Martin Luther. They are intended to introduce the historical background and theological content and implications of those writings or events, as well as raise questions about how they might pertain to consciously Lutheran parish ministry in twenty-first century America. The purpose is not to provide answers to these difficult questions, but to provoke reflection, personally or jointly, on how Luther’s life and thought relate to the challenges facing us. Since the inception of our country’s independence from British rule, American Christianity has had an uneasy relationship with the state. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights included a religious disestablishment clause, which grants the free exercise of religion. On the one hand, as the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his “Democracy in America” after a visit to the states, this clause protects religion from the incursion of the state, from having to change its beliefs or practices in accordance with whichever political party is in office. On the other hand, beginning with Thomas Jefferson many have argued that the First Amendment erects the infamous “wall of separation” between church and state, and they have sought legislation that would set up a purely secular state with no religious influence whatsoever. None of this is new to anyone who has entered the pastoral ministry in the last few decades. We have seen the cases debated in the halls of the Supreme Court of the United States, and some of those decisions have impacted our denomination directly (for instance, the 2012 Hosanna-Tabor decision, which involved a Missouri Synod parochial school).
Lutherans have never fit seamlessly into the American debates over church and state. Lutheran immigrants came from northern European state churches, which were subsidized by the state financially, governed by the state organizationally, and had their theology recognized by the state legally. The Lutheran tradition itself emerged under European monarchies, which oversaw the churches themselves in the Middle Ages, at the time of the Reformation, and in the centuries thereafter. As for Martin Luther? He regularly criticized the princes of his day, saying “a Christian prince is a rare bird,” but he never once could have imagined a truly “secular” prince in the sense that modern Americans understand that adjective. In fact, the word “secular” had no anti-religious connotation whatsoever in his day; it simply came from the Latin term for a long period of time (saeculum) and meant temporal or earthly, in contrast with the so-called spiritual authorities inside the church hierarchy. All were “Christian” in some sense of the word, but they had different responsibilities in different realms. Occasionally they overlapped, and where they did the secular authorities had it within their right to assist the church. It is in this sense that Luther allowed for the right of princes to act as “emergency bishops” in administering the church’s affairs and ordaining its clergy, it is in this sense that Luther defined the proper spheres of the “two kingdoms,” and it is in this sense that he appealed to princes to aid the German churches in bringing about reform in his August 1520 treatise, “Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation for the Betterment of the Christian Estate.” The treatise contains many important ideas, including the three walls the church had used to protect itself from reform, a series of reform proposals, and Luther’s call for a free Christian council on German soil. But it may be the title that best illustrates the view of church and state in Luther’s day, and how different that view is from ours. In the first place, Luther addresses “Christian Nobility,” that is, those charged with governing the churches in their regions. Since the early Middle Ages, the nobility—kings, princes, dukes—played a fundamental role in overseeing the churches. They built medieval cathedrals and monastic abbeys. They paid the clergy. They provided military protection and rights to the land. In the years just before the Reformation, they took a greater interest in actively administering the religious life of those churches, too. The papacy in Rome was more a court of final appeals by the later Middle Ages, but the nobility were the engines that made the institutional church go. Luther had every reason to think that truly Christian nobility would take an interest in reform and help support it financially and administratively. In addition to the “Christian Nobility,” though, the notion of a “German Nation” is also telling. By “German,” Luther doesn’t have in mind the modern nation-state of Germany. He has in mind rather the Holy Roman Empire, which essentially began with the crowning of Charlemagne by the pope as “Emperor of the Romans” at Christmas Day Mass in 800 A.D. In the seven centuries after that Christmas Eve Mass, Christian princes, kings, dukes, popes, and bishops formed a tenuous alliance with both religious and political interests in common. The notorious Jacques Voltaire sarcastically said, “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire,” and Protestants have been repeating that line ever since (though I am still not sure why a Christian would side with Voltaire, an avowed enemy of Christianity, against the church). But the secular rulers of the Holy Roman Empire largely supported the church and had the interests of Christians in mind, while the ecclesiastical authorities used the political and economic resources they had at their disposal for the good of the church and the people of that same Empire. Finally, the goal for Luther was the “betterment of the Christian estate,” that is, the improvement of religious life for all Christians. In the Middle Ages, the term “estate” (the Latin word is literally status, which means “standing”) referred to the three different categories of Christians: the regular clergy, or those who had taken monastic vows; the secular clergy, or your typical priest; and the laity. For Luther, one of the three walls the church used to insulate itself against change was the distinction between the sacred estates and the secular estate, that is, between the clergy and the laity—and by clergy he specifically has in mind the higher clergy, such as popes and bishops. In Luther’s treatise, however, there is only one estate (Stand in German, which is a German transliteration of the Latin term status): the baptized Christian, and every single baptized Christian is on the same level spiritually as every other baptized Christian. While many have different vocations—the word Luther uses here is “ministry” (Amt in German)—all have the same standing before God because of their baptisms. When he appeals to secular rulers to aid in the reform of the church, he does so not because their position as dukes or princes gives them any greater status than the common laity. That would be making the same mistake as Rome had with popes and bishops. Instead, the nobility of the German nation can use their specific God-given vocations to help their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ by carrying out the reforms the church so desperately needed. To that end, Luther adds a series of proposals—twenty-one, with another added in a later publication of the treatise—for reform of the church. They range from incorporating more ancient languages into the academic curriculum to endorsing clerical marriage, closing down monasteries, and eliminating pilgrimages to Rome. If the “Christian Nobility” were to carry out their responsibility to the “German Nation” by improving the “Christian Estate” through these reforms, then the people would be better off for it. Needless to say, this did not go as Luther wished. The chief ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V, outlawed Luther as a citizen of the Empire with his May 1521 Edict of Worms. Princes loyal to Rome forbade Luther’s German New Testament from being published and circulated. Later, when the prince of Hesse proposed a reform of German churches in accordance with Luther’s views, Luther himself stood in the way and claimed that reform should come only once the people have been instructed and not at the behest of a secular ruler. Luther wanted princes to aid in his reform, not enforce it, and definitely not prohibit it. That being said, the simple fact that Luther had a place for secular rulers in promoting biblically faithful change within the church is something we as modern Americans cannot quite comprehend. We don’t have a category for that kind of political involvement in religious affairs. It is sometimes called “Erastianism,” or simply decried by Americans as unconstitutional. But for Luther, for the early Lutherans, indeed for Lutherans in northern Europe over the course of several centuries, it was simply the way things were. Secular rulers were involved in the church, and they were involved in the church because they had positions that could provide help the church needed. They were secular, but not secular in the sense of opposing religion. Neither Luther nor subsequent European Lutherans would have ever understood secular in the sense it has taken in our culture. In America, though, that is our lot. We live in a society where independence from religion, even regulation of religion, is rising. Secular no longer means governmental or political, but it stands for opposition to Christianity. Surely there are Christians of many backgrounds serving in government, and even the occasional Lutheran, but when it comes to their occupations, they submit first and foremost to the laws of the land, not to the faith we hold in common. What are we to do, then, when laws run afoul of the Christian faith or are not in the best interest of the churches? Abortion is an easy target, but one of more recent consequence is the regulation of worship due to COVID-19. To speak charitably, state and local governments are doing the best they can to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus through implementing strict public health measures, which include prohibiting or limiting worship gatherings. At the same time, many clergy have cried foul over this because it seems to be an infringement upon the free exercise of religion. How can a politician, no matter how well-intentioned, tell a church when and how it is allowed to meet? We have even heard stories of politicians reminding Christians under lockdown that they are still free to worship, just not together. Does that not run the risk of defining for Christians what it means to be the church and how they are to worship? All this to say that the tensions of church and state are alive and well in American Christianity, and they have affected us as Lutherans in a way they simply did not affect Luther and his Lutheran successors over the centuries. We will never be in a position to ask secular rulers to assist us in reform, to protect us legally, or even to pay our bills (PPP loans notwithstanding). We are on our own, free to govern ourselves as we wish, believe as we wish, worship as we wish. We are also thrust into a religious marketplace, where we must compete for parishioners, subsidize our ministries, and advocate for ourselves when we believe our constitutional rights have been curtailed. We have all the advantages of religious disestablishment, but that comes with disadvantages, too—disadvantages that Luther and Lutherans for roughly four centuries thereafter could never have imagined. We are on our own, for better or worse. This is the next in a monthly series of articles requested by the New Jersey District President commemorating anniversaries of particular writings or events in the life of Martin Luther. They are intended to introduce the historical background and theological content and implications of those writings or events, as well as raise questions about how they might pertain to consciously Lutheran parish ministry in twenty-first century America. The purpose is not to provide answers to these difficult questions, but to provoke reflection, personally or jointly, on how Luther’s life and thought relate to the challenges facing us.
What might excommunication look like in America today? By and large, American churches don’t practice church discipline in the way they once did. When it is practiced, the results are less than favorable. If our congregations were to excommunicate a member, it is likely that person would find a new church home without much trouble. Most churches don’t require a transfer of membership from outside their denomination, and many don’t even seek one from within their own denomination. A great number of American churches don’t belong to a denomination anyway and, given the bottom line fiscal realities we all face, they may not be inclined to inquire about that prospective member’s past—the real concern is getting another financial supporter into the pews no matter the cost. Practicalities aside, however, we must not overlook the most significant implication of this situation: excommunication loses its very purpose. Whether it is St. Paul in the New Testament, the practice of public penance in the early church, or our own practice of excommunication, the goal is always to restore the fallen brother or sister in Christ to full participation in the local congregation through repentance. Martin Luther had precisely this goal in mind when he wrote about the proper use and the abuse of excommunication in his 1520 “A Sermon on the Ban,” preached in late 1519, but published in summer 1520. It is important to understand the context behind this sermon, because Luther was in many respects practicing what he preached. Shortly after the controversy over indulgences began in 1517, Rome began an official inquiry into Luther’s teachings to determine if they were heretical. This early process reached its conclusion with the famous interview before Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg in October 1518 (“Revoco!”), but before that Luther had already published a sermon on the power of excommunication. Keenly aware of the possibility that he may be found guilty of heresy, Luther used the sermon to distinguish between internal communion and external communion. Since God alone places someone into the internal communion of the faithful, then God alone excludes someone from the same communion. By contrast, ecclesiastical excommunication only excludes the individual from external participation in the church. Furthermore, in the event of an unjust excommunication, the Christian still belongs to the internal communion of the faithful. Luther’s heresy trial resumed in early 1520, after his views at the Leipzig Debate of 1519 were condemned by the theology faculties of Louvain and Cologne. Luther’s debate opponent at Leipzig, John Eck, had made his way to Rome by spring 1520 and lit the match that accelerated the process. Though the bull condemning Luther for heresy was not published until June 1520 and did not arrive in Wittenberg until October 1520, the outcome was all but certain. Rome intended to excommunicate Luther for his public teachings against what it deemed established church doctrine and for his protests against church authority. Luther knew exactly what awaited him, and his publication of “A Sermon on the Ban” reflected that. Nonetheless, Luther’s position on excommunication hardly blunts the instrument so as to minimize its impact on him. To the contrary, he speaks in surprisingly objective, balanced tones about how excommunication should be understood and practiced. First, he recalls the 1518 sermon (and his understanding of Christendom from last month’s “On the Papacy at Rome”) by identifying two different types of fellowship or communion in the church: an inward, spiritual, and invisible fellowship, and an external, physical, and visible fellowship. Excommunication relates to the latter. In the external, physical, and visible fellowship, one “is allowed to participate in the holy sacrament, to receive it and to partake of it together with others” (LW 39:8). It is from this fellowship that one is excluded by a pope or bishop because of sin—for which Luther uses the designation the “small ban.” Alongside the small ban, there is also the “large ban,” which entails civic penalties such as prohibition of buying, selling, trading, and the like. Similar again to his 1518 sermon, Luther argues that even though someone may be excommunicated unjustly, he or she remains in fellowship with Christ and, thus, still shares in the internal, spiritual, invisible fellowship of the church. Interestingly, though, Luther only reserves the highest praise for ecclesiastical excommunication—both the small ban and the large. For instance, he says, “Christ instituted this outward ban, small as well as large” (8). Furthermore, using language that strikes us as entirely medieval, he claims that when the small ban in particular is justified by the sin of the Christian and is applied rightly, it is to be seen as a gracious act of “mother” church: “For his mother, the holy church, wants to show her dear son this unbearable damage of sin, by way of punishment of the ban, and thereby wants to bring him back from the devil to God again” (10). Excommunication is a “pure and motherly punishment” and it is instituted “only to restore the inward spiritual fellowship” (11). Luther even makes clear that this ban is for more than the notorious heretic: “the ban should not only be used against those who oppose the faith, but also against those who sin in public” (21). Despite the fact that Luther was hard pressed by the authorities to recant his views, despite the fact that he knew excommunication would come his way, despite the fact that he believed excommunication for teaching his views was wrongheaded and ultimately unjust, he did not dismiss the practice outright or minimize its consequences. On the contrary, he extolled its benefits as a salutary institution of Christ to rebuke the sinner through the church and restore the sinner to full communion with the church through reception of the sacrament. The Lutheran understanding of excommunication has largely followed the same lines that Luther laid out in 1520. Through the office of the keys, Christ has empowered his regularly called ministers with the task of remitting or retaining sins (Matthew 16, John 20). Bishops in particular have the power of jurisdiction, that is, “the authority to excommunicate those guilty of open crimes, and again to absolve them if they are converted and seek absolution” (Apology 28.13). Luther himself further explains that the “small ban” is the “true Christian excommunication” in which “manifest and obstinate sinners are not admitted to the Sacrament and other communion of the church until they amend their lives and avoid sin” (Smalcald Articles III.9). It is worth pondering what Luther means by “manifest and obstinate sinners.” He has in mind those whose errors are publicly known and who persist in those errors despite sound biblical, pastoral correction. He isn’t talking about the individual struggling with private sins or a pastor siding with one group over another in a congregational conflict. “Manifest and obstinate” implies an individual who teaches against the doctrine of the church or commits an egregious sin that contradicts Scripture, yet has no qualms about doing so. The refusal to remove such a sinner establishes an unhealthy precedent for others, who may come to believe such teaching or behavior is acceptable. This is why St. Paul urges the Corinthian church to excommunicate a man sleeping with his stepmother (1 Cor. 5:1; 5:4) and claims that “a little leaven leavens the whole lump” (1 Cor. 5:6). While the way this happens in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod may have its own congregationalist peculiarities, the theological foundation is the same: Lutheran Christians should exclude from their altars those who teach falsely or live immorally, and who do so publicly and unrepentantly, not only to restore the sinner to full communion through repentance and absolution, but also to protect the faithful from the unhealthy teaching or lifestyle that may tempt them, too. I suspect that for most Lutheran clergy, though, the theology behind excommunication isn’t much of an obstacle. The real challenge is its execution. On the one hand, Lutheran pastors fear the ramifications if we rightfully excommunicate a parishioner for an idea or behavior the rest of the congregation, let alone the culture, finds no fault with. On the other hand, we feel powerless to affect any change in the life of the manifest and obstinate sinner because we realize that person will likely land at another congregation without that congregation or its pastor having any indication that the person was excommunicated. That is the danger of living in a multidenominational religious marketplace like ours, where people are free to pick and choose whichever congregation fits their liking—or their sin, as the case may be. It wasn’t like that in the ancient church, where you did not have competing congregations, or in the medieval or Reformation-era churches, where the overlapping spheres of church and government enabled civil enforcement of religious beliefs and lifestyles. We don’t live in those eras, so we have to wrestle with the question of excommunication in the American church today. How should we go about it? What kind of sins might merit excommunication? Who is subject to excommunication for false teaching—just pastors, or theologians, or what about your ordinary lay member? Maybe the biggest question is whether excommunication is worth the hassle. What difference will it make? Do I want to risk my job, my income, and the support of my congregation over something that many will simply relativize or dismiss? Practically speaking, most manifest and obstinate sinners excommunicate themselves: they stop communing altogether. They would rather find a church that advocates for their views or behaviors than listen to Lutheran pastors preach and teach against those views or behaviors. Maybe worse still, the devil uses their sin and resistance to correction to erode their Christian faith altogether. This is the exact consequence, however, that the practice of excommunication seeks to avoid. The goal is not just to exclude the sinner, but to bring the sinner to repentance through correction so that he or she can participate fully at the table of the Lord and celebrate a common faith and a common morality with fellow Christians. This is the next in a monthly series of articles requested by the New Jersey District President commemorating anniversaries of particular writings or events in the life of Martin Luther. They are intended to introduce the historical background and theological content and implications of those writings or events, as well as raise questions about how they might pertain to consciously Lutheran parish ministry in twenty-first century America. The purpose is not to provide answers to these difficult questions, but to provoke reflection, personally or jointly, on how Luther’s life and thought relate to the challenges facing us.
Lutheranism’s relationship with the church has always been, well, complicated. On the one hand, we tend to criticize the institutional church, in particular denominational leadership, when it stands in the way of how we want to conduct our ministries. On the other hand, we depend upon what the institutional church provides us. For instance, without our own denominational institutions, we would have no seminaries to train clergy and no publishing house to provide us with Lutheran ministry resources and no health care plan or pension plan to aid us when we are ill or retired. The same was true for the Lutheranism that emerged out of the Reformation. Without universities or superintendents (the German version of bishops) or church orders or consistories of clergy or even state governments administering the affairs of the church, there would have been structures to support the ministry of Word and Sacrament in those lands. We as Lutherans have long struggled with this tension between the ministry of the church and the institutions of the church, between the preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments that creates faith and saves sinners, on the one hand, and the institutional structures that facilitate that ministry. Maybe one reason for this tension in Lutheranism is that Lutheran theology developed in the midst of a conflict between Luther’s reforms and the ecclesiastical bureaucracy in Rome. It is worth reiterating that Luther never intended to overturn the existing structures in the church or to criticize the papacy. He consciously avoided those issues as the controversy over indulgences grew. Luther’s opponents, however, immediately turned his criticism of indulgences into a referendum on the papacy. Critics like John Tetzel (the infamous preacher of indulgences). Sylvester Prierias (the Roman official who responded to Luther’s “95 Theses”), and John Eck (Luther’s debate opponent at Leipzig in 1519) all argued that the pope had every right to create articles of faith and to institute indulgences because of the authority given him by Christ over the church. Setting aside the fact that their position did not necessarily reflect what medieval theologians and canon lawyers actually taught about papal authority, this became their first line of defense against Luther. Augustine Alfeld, a Franciscan friar in Leipzig, fits this mold. He had written against Luther in April 1520, arguing that unless a Christian submits to the pope as head of the church, then he is not a member of that church. Luther could not let this point stand, so he responded with his June 1520 treatise, “On the Papacy and the Church, Against the Most Celebrated Romanist in Leipzig.” In “On the Papacy,” Luther specifically targeted Alfeld’s definition of the church. According to Alfeld, every community on earth necessitates a physical head, and since Christendom (Christenheit) is a single community it requires a single head under Christ, namely, the pope. Luther will respond to this by speaking about Christendom in three ways: there is a spiritual, internal Christendom; a physical, external Christendom; and a legal Christendom, which is just a corruption of the external, physical Christendom. The first two are more pertinent to us. For Luther, the primary definition of the church is that of a “spiritual, internal Christendom.” This spiritual, internal Christendom is made up of believers who affirm Christ and receive his forgiveness by faith. It is not a matter of civic affiliation or external membership in church, but of faith in Christ and in what he has done for the Christian. As Luther says later in the 1537 Smalcald Articles, the church consists of “holy believers and lambs who hear the voice of their Shepherd” and has to do with “the Word of God and true faith” (III.7). This is also why the Augsburg Confession is able to say that “many hypocrites and evil persons” are mingled with the “congregation of saints and true believers,” who alone make up the spiritual, internal Christenheit (Augsburg VIII. For Luther, the church is defined first and foremost by the faith of the believers. But it should also be said that Luther’s definition has nothing whatsoever in common with the prevalent meme that “the church isn’t the building, but the people.” The church is not strictly the people themselves at all—that is an idea pioneered by Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of Protestant Liberalism, who described the church as a voluntary association of like-minded individuals. Rather, it is the gathering (Versammlung, Augsburg VII) of believers, whose faith is always and ever created and sustained by the Holy Spirit at work through the Word and the sacraments (Augsburg V). But there remains another side to the church that, while secondary, is not in any way negligible. “This other side of Christianity,” Luther says, is “physical, external Christendom.” Unlike it the spiritual, internal church, it is certainly “man-made,” but that doesn’t mean it is needless. On the contrary, Luther adds: “It is just as if I were talking about a man and called him ‘spiritual’ according to his soul, and ‘physical’ according to his body…So, too, the Christian assembly is a community united in one faith according to the soul, although, according to the body, it cannot be assembled in one place since every group of people is assembled in its own place” (LW 39:70). Though the ministry of Word and Sacrament happens in local congregations, those local congregations require structures and institutions to facilitate what they do. Yes, those structures and institutions are man-made, not mandated by Scripture; yes, they are external and do not in and of themselves create or sustain faith in the heart through the Holy Spirit. Yet they still remain essential so that the local ministry of Word and Sacrament can function. What Luther has in mind here again are the fiscal, administrative, and legal facets of the church. These are never to be confused with the essence of the church, nor are they its primary definition. Where that happens, those institutional structures take on an outsized importance that detracts from the spiritual, internal component of the church. (This is also what Luther has in mind with his third definition of Christendom, created by ecclesiastics who define the church in terms of its buildings and financial resources, which he considers a corruption of the necessary physical, external church.) At the same time, it is necessary precisely because it makes possible the ministry of Word and Sacraments that creates and sustains faith, and thus forms the spiritual, internal church. Luther makes quite clear in this treatise that there are two sides of the church, each equally important, yet they must be distinguished. The spiritual, internal church always remains primary, while the physical, external church supports the work that brings about that spiritual, internal church. Since the physical, external church is “man-made,” it will look different at times and it will take different shape in certain places. Such a definition frees us to make the ministry of Word and Sacrament primary, and to be adaptable in terms of how we structure, fund, and govern the church’s practical affairs. Nevertheless, it is in writings like this that Luther bequeaths to subsequent Lutherans an ongoing tension. Lutherans have often referred to these two dimensions as spiritual and physical, internal and external, invisible and visible, universal and local, often times making one unnecessary or irrelevant. But that’s not true for Luther, nor is it true for us. At the end of the day every church of every place and every time requires both dimensions. It is also the reason why in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession Philip Melanchthon quite intentionally describes the church as “not only the fellowship of outward objects and rites, as other governments,” but primarily “a fellowship of faith and of the Holy Ghost in hearts” (Apology 7.5). That “not only” (non…tantum) is significant: to understand the church rightly, we cannot ignore the “fellowship of outward objects and rites” that enable the ministry of Word and Sacrament to function (think: conventions, voters meetings, church constitutions). And it is only through that ministry of Word and Sacrament that faith and the Holy Spirit come to the hearts of sinners. On the basis of what Luther and the confessions have to say about this distinction, two important points must be underscored. First, the ministry of Word and Sacrament is not an adiaphoron, nor does it belong to the external, physical definition of the church. On the contrary, what is preached and administered, heard and received in the public, corporate worship of the church belongs without question to the internal, spiritual aspect of the church. As the Formula of Concord says, “God does not call without means” (FC Solid Declaration XI.27), but “he has ordained for this purpose His Word and Sacraments as ordinary means and instruments” (FC SD XI.76). Second, though the structures and institutions of the church are clearly secondary to the salvation conferred to believers through Word and Sacrament, they are not dispensable. They remain absolutely necessary and fundamental, if evolving and ever-changing, components of the external, physical church. Without those structures and institutions, the ministry of Word and Sacrament simply does not happen. One look at St. Paul’s repeated appeals to stewardship and administrative affairs in his letters, or the frequent reorganization of the church in Acts, bears witness to that. Defending the relevance of the institutional church may not strike a chord for many a Missouri Synod pastor in our American religious context. Much like the secular politics that so shape our approach to denominational life, we prize autonomy over authority, freedom over structure, independence over dependence. When denominational decisions don’t go our way, when denominational officials we don’t like get elected, or when denominational policies don’t sit well with us, we can be tempted to ignore them, or to reduce our ministry to the congregation that pays us. But that viewpoint simply does not appreciate the necessary role the physical, external church plays in our pastoral formation and our pastoral ministry. Simply put, we need it—even when we don’t like it! How, then, should we approach our denominational participation, especially when we find much to disagree with? And how should we talk about that denomination when so many among whom we minister, willfully or not, may know and care little about the denomination at-large? After all, according to reported statistics, New Jersey is the second-smallest district in the Missouri Synod in terms of reported communicant membership (after Wyoming) and in terms of reported congregations (after the SELC). More to the point, despite living in the country’s most densely populated state, we are dwarfed by Roman Catholic, Reformed, and Jewish traditions. The temptation in our relative outpost here in the Garden State is to view ourselves independent of what happens in St. Louis or Fort Wayne—or maybe Springfield, where our own district office is located. How can we understand ourselves as part of something bigger, though, as part of something downright fundamental to the work we do here in our corner of the country? How can we create a broader denominational consciousness not only among us as clergy, but among our parishioners, where we care about what happens at the International Center and Synod conventions and our seminaries and Concordia University System schools? How can we as clergy participate more actively in these structures, not just on the synodical level, but on the district level, whether that is circuit meetings, pastoral conferences, or service to district itself? How can we encourage our congregations and individual congregants to likewise avail themselves of those resources and contribute to them by serving in so many of the capacities that require lay involvement and support? Whether we like it or not, these institutional structures are fundamental to who we were and to what we do. We need them, and they need us. By: Rick Serina This is the next in a monthly series of articles requested by the New Jersey District President commemorating anniversaries of particular writings or events in the life of Martin Luther. They are intended to introduce the historical background and theological content and implications of those writings or events, as well as raise questions about how they might pertain to consciously Lutheran parish ministry in twenty-first century America. The purpose is not to provide answers to these difficult questions, but to provoke reflection, personally or jointly, on how Luther’s life and thought relate to the challenges facing us.
“Good works certainly follow from true faith, when it is not a dead, but a living faith, as certainly and without doubt as fruit from a good tree” (Formula of Concord: Solid Declaration, IV.1). There may be nothing more difficult for pastors to believe than this. We stand in the pulpit week after week, preach the gospel, then often have no clue what our parishioners are doing in the intervening six days. Are they living faithfully as Christians? Do they take to heart the things we’ve said? Do they believe this gospel, or is it just another interesting idea, some ancient myth, some old-fashioned view handed down by their parents? The temptation for us comes in trying to evaluate whether or not this Word has taken root in their hearts and minds. We begin to look for tangible evidence. Maybe it’s their church attendance or their participation in bible study or their offerings. Maybe it’s the apparent success of their marriages or the piety of their children. But we want to see something that shows us our labor is not in vain, our preaching of the gospel is believed, and the Word has made some difference in the lives of those we serve. We want to see those good works that are supposed to follow from a “living faith.” For Luther, as for the Lutheran tradition that comes after him, there is always a tension between the doctrine of justification by faith and the good works of the faithful. Justification is by faith in Christ alone—more precisely, by grace through faith apart from works for Christ’s sake (Augsburg Confession IV). Yet, as the confessions also say, “good works are necessary” (Formula of Concord: Solid Declaration, IV.4)—not necessary for salvation, but still necessary because God commands them. Yet what is the relationship between this faith that justifies us and the good works that we must—yes, must—do? The image of fruit growing from a good tree, as Christ described it in John 15, reflects that relationship well: good works flow from faith in Christ. They are not the reason for justification, but they are the natural consequence of them. What this doesn’t mean, however, is that we can easily and readily discern what counts as good fruits. This, of course, was the problem in Luther’s day. Any number of good works were appointed for the faithful—fasting, distinction of meats, pilgrimages, almsgiving, praying to saints, indulgences. That’s not to say these were all bad, or that there wasn’t some benefit in each of them. But they ran the risk of being the sort of arbitrary, “self-chosen works” the Formula of Concord would later condemn (Epitome, VI.3). Instead, for Luther and Lutherans, the moral law enshrined in the Decalogue became the clearest, most concise, and least arbitrary way to urge good works upon the believer, and for Christians to shape and mold their lives in accordance with God’s will. That moral law was to serve as the standard for Christian life and conduct, though Luther would take it one step farther: obedience to the Ten Commandments in fact begins with the exercise of faith. Luther first set out to address this thorny relationship between faith and good works in his May 1520 “Treatise on Good Works.” In a way that anticipates his November 1520 “Freedom of a Christian,” Luther wanted to preempt the objection that the believer’s confidence in forgiveness, baptism, absolution, etc., would decrease the motivation for good works. In “Freedom of a Christian,” he laid out his dual principle regarding this tension: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” But he takes a very different tack in his May treatise on good works. Rather than juxtaposing faith and works, he instead conflates them together: faith is a work, indeed the “first, highest, and most precious of all good works” (AE 44:23), and it is a work that arises from the First Commandment. Much as he would later argue in the Large Catechism, idolatry for Luther is to fear, love, or trust anything more than the one, true God. Faith in Christ and his promises, then, becomes the principal good work of the Christian. Luther does not mean that Christians believe on their own apart from the Holy Spirit—that would not become a source of controversy until several years later. What Luther means is that all good works arise from faith. Indeed, he will say that even many of those “self-chosen” abuses in his day—“the founding and decorating of churches, altars, and monastic houses, the gathering of bells, jewels, garments, trinkets and treasures, running to Rome and to the saints”—can still be truly good works, “not because of their virtue,” but only if they arise from faith (AE 44:32)! It is in this sense that faith is obedience to the First Commandment, and thus the first of all good works and the source of all other good works. Luther then goes on to address each of the remaining Ten Commandments and relates them back to faith. In each of the commandments, he sees concrete examples of how faith plays itself out in the life of the Christian. For Luther, it isn’t sufficient to affirm justification by faith, but for that justifying faith to have no corresponding impact upon the works of a believer. On the contrary, Luther expects good fruits to follow faith, and for those who have been justified by faith, good works arise from their faith as a response to what the law commands. Surprisingly, one sees no rigid distinction between law and gospel, let alone contrast or opposition. The Ten Commandments represent God’s moral law and are the basis for the good works that justified Christians do. Moreover, Luther doesn’t dismiss the lack of works on the part of the faithful with some reference to Christians as both justified and sinners--simul iustus et peccator—but confidently assumes that those who are justified by faith will rightly obey God’s commands and do good works. Yet this obedience, this active righteousness, arises not from the threats of the law, the self-chosen works of the people, or even the dictates of the church: it arises from faith in the gospel, a faith which naturally gives birth to the good works of Christians in conformity with God’s will. At least, that’s what Luther assumed. But what about us? Are we that confident? After all, Luther didn’t live in a culture like ours. In his day, God’s moral law governed all society in some measure. No one doubted what God commanded. There was pressure at all levels of society—civil, ecclesiastical, and domestic—to live according to that law. They may have misunderstood how works related to salvation, but no one openly denied the need for good works or questioned their basis (though that would bubble to the surface as the Reformation continued to spread). We don’t inhabit such a world. In fact, much of what we preach is openly and maliciously opposed by the culture around us. It may be one thing to question how faith relates to good works, but it is another thing altogether to deny any natural or universal basis for morality, as we hear so often. Given a context like this, how can we (as Luther seems to suggest) confidently preach the gospel of justification by faith and assume that Christians will naturally bear fruit in accordance with their faith in Christ? Was Luther simply being naïve? Can we afford to be that naïve, when so much of what Scripture teaches about morality is unknown, disregarded, or downright opposed? Can we pretend that the moral dissolution of our culture won’t have some influence upon Christians who live in it? Or must we accept that the only thing we can do is preach the Word, then trust that that same Spirit who creates faith in the hearts of sinners (when and where he so wills, as Augsburg Confession V says), will likewise bring forth fruit in accordance with the faith he has created? Do we need proof of that fruit? Or can we be content to preach that Word through which the Spirit works faith and produces fruit, then trust that he will? The only power we have to change people is the preaching of God’s Word. Indeed, the only power we’ve ever had to change people is the preaching of God’s Word. |