FW: Concerning the Unity of the Lutheran Church

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Feed: Gnesio
Posted on: Wednesday, December 26, 2012 2:51 PM
Author: Gnesio
Subject: Concerning the Unity of the Lutheran Church

 

If it belongs to the essence of the Lutheran church that it is a confessional church, the church of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession, which in turn means, since the later confessions are all commentaries on the Augsburg Confession, the church of the Book of Concord, then it is a matter of the very existence of the Missouri Synod that it remain also in the future the church which is loyal to the confession, rooted in the Confession, and proclaiming the evangelical truth attested by the Confession. It is a matter of her theological, not her physical existence. For one must assume that this great, to date so healthy, growing church body, one of the most dynamic church denominations in America, still has a great future, even if the contrasts which are visible today should lead to a schism. But the vital question for a church is not so much whether it will continue to live, but whether it will remain that which it has been and which according to its innermost essence it ought to be… Historical research in Lutheran theology has shown how deeply [Lutheran] Orthodoxy was influenced by that same Aristotelian philosophy which Luther had banished from dogmatics. We know now that [Lutheran] Orthodoxy is a very similar synthesis of the natural (reason) and supernatural (revelation) knowledge of God as was the scholasticism of the Middle Ages… For as soon as the sola Scriptura is superordinated to the sola fide we are on the road to a false understanding of the Lutheran church. It is the Reformed understanding of the evangelical, the Protestant church, which emerges victorious. For all Reformed from Zwingli and Calvin to Brunner and Barth, and all sects which have come out of the Reformed churches understand the true Christian, the evangelical church, as the church of the sola Scriptura in which there are then, in accord with various ways of understanding the Scripture, various schools. On the basis of this understanding of church, Lutheranism is today being wooed by Modernism and Fundamentalism, by the ecumenical organizations of the World Council of Churches and by the fundamentalistic International Council of Christians Churches. If it accepts this concept of church it is lost, and will be ground to pieces and absorbed by these contrasts. It sounds so enticing that all churches should stand together for which the Holy Scripture is still the verbally inspired, inerrant Word of God. Should not Bible believing Lutherans, Presbyterians and Baptists today together and jointly proclaim and defend the authority of the Word of God? Do they not, for practical purposes already stand together? Is not that which [P.E.] Kretzmann and [Theodore] Engelder ("The Scripture Cannot be Broken," St. Louis, 1944) have published in Concordia Publishing House concerning the Holy Scripture found in precisely the same manner in the writings of the Baptist and Reformed Fundamentalists? But is it possible that a Lutheran should write so much as even one page concerning the Holy Scripture on which all is not dominated by the fundamental distinction of Law and Gospel? Is it possible for a Lutheran to admit in earnest that a Baptist is a Bible believing man? Luther would not do it. Is it possible for a Bible believing person to deny that Holy Baptism is the washing of regeneration and the bread which we bless in the Lord's Supper the Body of Christ? What kind of faith in the Bible is it that can deny these things? And even though the theologians, when they teach concerning the Scripture in the same manner as the orthodox Reformed do, in spirit accompany this teaching with the whole Lutheran doctrine, or presuppose this doctrine, the simple Missouri Synod Christian who reads the books of the Fundamentalists and the devotional literature that is founded on them will not even notice the difference. It will not be long before they will find as much edification in a radio sermon which is substantially Baptist as the Southern Baptists experience listening to the "Lutheran Hour." … excerpts from Hermann Sasse, Letters to Lutheran Pastors #20, "Confession and Theology in the Missouri Synod."

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