Not the gold standard. . .

When I was a teenager my father would sometimes complain of me that "I had a champagne taste on a beer budget..."  Surely I am not the only one who recalls that little phrase.  Its meaning is quite obvious.  You cannot afford what you want so you adjust your taste to what you can afford or need (vs want).  When you think about it, it is not bad advice.  In the purchase of cars, I routinely defer to what I need and can afford over what I desire.  In the purchase of clothing, I tend to the clearance rack.  If you cannot afford the best, you accept the best you can afford.  It works in so many things but it is a terrible way to look at the Church.

Of late, the discussion over residential seminary and the liturgy has used another phrase the gold standard.  While some may be old enough to recall when our nation was actually on the gold standard, its meaning as a shorthand phrase to describe that past is largely lost.  Instead, the gold standard has become, at least in common parlance, the champagne taste and it is countered by what is urgent or affordable in the present moment.  In both phrases, the idea is that no one disputes that the residential seminary is better or even best OR that the liturgy is better or even best.  The problem is that we cannot afford either one right now.  We are running a deficit of clergy, time is of the essence, pastors have families that need not be uprooted to go to seminary, online training has become normal, and local control and connection is preferred over a centralize control manifest in a seminary setting.  Yes, the complainers all agree that residential seminary is better but right now we need to adjust to a new norm.

In the same way, the liturgy is spoken of as the same kind of gold standard.  It would be great if we all had pipe organs and choirs and people who know the words and music of the liturgy and sang with gusto and it attracted those outside the Church but that is not the case now.  Even small parishes using the liturgy and hymnal insist they cannot afford the gold standard of organ (I should say organist) so they have to use something else - something that is affordable.  Large parishes insist that they cannot pack them in without a praise band and entertainment style worship and though they wish it were different it is not.  As per a previous column, the gold standard gets in the way of reaching people for Jesus.  I could go on and on but you get the point.

My perspective is quite different.  I do not think that residential seminary or the liturgy is the gold standard or the champagne we can no longer afford.  I think it is simply who we are as Lutherans.  We long ago and from the start lived within the realm of a residential seminary (Wittenberg), of academic curriculum and standards, and of an educated clergy.  We did so not to change what had been but as people adopting the status quo.  We did not invent the residential seminary but accepted what had been and used it ever since with a few minor variations.  This is neither something new or unique to us.  It is who we are and who the Church had been before us.  In the same way, the liturgy is not something we invented nor did we perfect it.  We adopted it and simply added a set is rubrics or directions for use with the existing missal (that is called the Formula Missae).  For that matter, we did not, at least in the beginning, even deviate from the Latin norm!  It was who we were and are (well, are to some of us).  The problem here is not looking at things beyond our reach or price range now.  No, indeed, the problem is that some of us are no longer want to be who we were.  

This has been framed wrongly.  I blame adiaphora and Lutheran refusal to make rules about such things (except bylaws which we love to use to try to solve doctrinal problems).  It is time to get over it.  We are not a group of autonomous and independent congregations who can do what they please with impunity.  We have agreed to be who we are.  The confessional standard is not simply for cerebral appreciation or theoretical unity.  It is how we live.  We hold these things not as ideals but as the norm and how we form pastors and do worship flows from this norm -- not from cultural situations or preferences but from what we believe, teach, and confess.  When we apply this gold standard or champagne idea to such things, we are in essence watering down our confession and admitting that we can operate outside that confession when the need demands.  

It is as if we are making what might be necessary in the emergency condition of the folks lost on a desert island to be the norm which establishes everything we do.  Of course we have and will always have emergencies but these do not define who we are or establish what faithful practice is.  They are always exceptions.  Sure, we can call anything and everything an emergency (like we did during Covid) and hasten the dilution of what we believe, teach, and confess into mere theory to be set aside whenever we think it has become a problem or we can admit that emergencies are rare and refuse to define the rule by these exceptions.  I would add beauty to the list along with residential seminary, the liturgy, hymn, chant, and song.  Beauty in the house of the Lord is not decoration but words, including the Divine Word, expressed in art, glass, carving, metalwork, and stone.  Warehouses suffice as an emergency substitute but once they become the norm, everything else becomes optional as well.  What is merely optional almost always becomes exceptional and not the norm at all.

Bottom line:  Residential seminaries and the liturgy are not gold standards or champagne tastes but merely the living out of who we say we are.  They are not set in stone but they change incrementally and not radically over time.  There is a hermeneutic of continuity going on here.  It is not fruit basket upset because the times are changing but the steady course of a ship which is aimed not at getting through this storm but arriving safely and faithfully at the home port.   

The start of it all. . .

Let me state for the record that I have no objection to scholars debating the authorship of Biblical books in which the author is not named within or attributed to someone in another Biblical book.  I suppose it is a n impossibility for the same to resist asking a similar question when the authorship is named or attributed.  It is, for my part, the least interesting of questions but, well, for those who live and breathe a mystery, have at it.  What I do object to is when the starting point of it the inquiry is to disregard or belittle what Scripture does say about authorship. 

If Scripture includes a reference to authorship or if the authorship has been attributed to someone in another Biblical book or if tradition has assigned authorship for good reason to someone, why must the debate begin by picking apart what Scripture says or using so-called science or archeology to insist why the Scriptures or tradition must be wrong.  What is there gained by immediately calling into question the veracity of Scripture or the primacy of tradition well established?  I can only presume that the whole enterprise is designed to raise questions about all of Scripture and not simply authorship.  Frankly, I have seldom been proven wrong in this assertion.

It is certainly one thing to begin with what Scripture clearly says about authorship or other things and to expound upon that using the clear passages of Scripture to illuminate the unclear.  It is quite another to use as your starting point that what Scripture clearly says must be wrong.  Yet that is how we got into trouble until now Scripture no longer has the confidence of many if not most commentators.  Indeed, I fear that the majority of those who encounter the Word of God begin with the presumption that it cannot be the Word of God but just might contain words of God.  Filled with the self-importance of that presumption, it goes one step further and insists that the job of the sophisticated scholar is to tell us which words belong to God and which do not. In this way, they save us poor foolish, superstitious, naive folks from being deluded by what the words actually say and mean.

Instead of paying attention to the remarkable consistency of teaching within the history of Christianity from the earliest days to the present, the scholar today uses every minor difference or fringe figure's dispute to say that there is no such thing as the catholic and apostolic faith at all -- at least nothing we can know for sure so far removed from the Biblical era.  Yet, the same scholars do not hesitate to presume upon Scripture what seems tenable, reasonable, logical, or acceptable in the present moment.  While this is not about same sex relationships, I will use this as an example.  The scholar begins by insisting that what is today (regularized same sex relationships in a nominally monogamous and legal setting) was never known in the Biblical era so therefore what the Scriptures say does not apply to such relationships.  In this way, it is impossible to argue against this.  It is implicit in the mind of the liberal or progressive that once you take what is condemned in Scripture (homosexual activity) and place it within the context of a relationship sanctioned by law and approved by the majority within a given culture, then Scripture has nothing to say about such homosexual behavior.  We could follow the same sort of logic about a thousand different things and end up the same place.  You cannot trust the Bible.

I once had a family interested in membership who insisted that they only believed the Bible and that creed or confession were not important.  So when I asked them if baptism saved or Christ's flesh and blood were really present in the Eucharist or that the pastor had the authority to forgive sins in Christ's name, they insisted the answer was "no."  If it says that, it cannot mean that and what it means must be different than what it says.  In response, I suggested to them that they had the marks of becoming a proud liberal.  They were deeply offended.  Why would I say that?  Because anytime you can begin to set aside what Scripture says because it offends your sensibilities or logic or conception of things, it is the start of questioning everything until little stands except the golden rule and a nice but irrelevant deity.

Over the years I have never met someone who took seriously what Scripture said until he began to believe nothing but I have met plenty of people who no longer took Scripture seriously and ended up believing nothing at all.  In other words, people who believed what Scripture said were less likely to abandon the Word of God but those who began to open the Bible with a question were highly likely to end up abandoning the Word of God.  The Bible cannot say that and if it does it cannot mean that -- this is a sure way to insist that Scripture must prove itself before they will believe any of it.  Sadly, this conversation too often starts with an assertion that we really do not know much at all about what Scripture says of itself and what we do know must be taken with a grain of salt.  

While we love to lump everyone into the fundamentalist camp if they pay attention to what Scripture says as the voice of God, the reality is that Lutherans do not fit the bill of a fundamentalist.  Indeed, the renewal of patrology or the commentary on Scripture as God's Word is a characteristically Lutheran contribution.  The idea that Scripture has some mystery to crack to behold some greater deeper truth (can anyone say Gnostic) seems to be a more Roman and progressive idea.  Rome says leave it to the pope or the bishops while the progressives insist we leave it to the experts.  In this way, despite what Benedict XVI warned of higher criticism, Rome seems captive to those who begin with skepticism while Lutherans begin with confidence.

The self-interpreting or transparent text . . .

Anyone who is Lutheran knows the word perspicuity.  Indeed, Lutherans have held to the clarity of Scripture, insisting that Scripture is clear, ever since Luther in On the Bondage of the Will.   It is one of those ideas that we know but are not at all sure what it means.  The contention of the Reformers’ Scripture is clear and its meaning self-evident or transparent is best seen as a claim against Rome's insistence that no one can read Scripture without the interpretive authority of the Church and its teaching magisterium to define what Scripture says.  For goodness' sake, this idea of the clarity of Scripture does not mean that Scripture is a simple or easy book to read.  In fact, everyone knows and believes that many things in Scripture are difficult to understand or else everyone would agree on what it says and means.  Our Lord Himself said that it is not given to everyone to understand the things of God, that the will of God is to reveal the truth to the small while hiding it from the great. While everyone knows that a knowledge of the original languages of Scripture is a help, the key does not come from knowing how to use the tools.  Scripture interprets Scripture works because the student of the Scriptures knows the book and approaches it by faith, knowing the Holy Spirit as guide.  But what this does not mean is that there is no need for the teaching authority of the Church.

Augustine famously said he would not have believed were it not for the authority of the Church.  He does not minimize the role of Scripture against the Church but understands the role of the Church to teach the Scriptures.  Protestantism has left us with a tyranny of individual interpreters who cannot be challenged, too many popes, if you will.  Sometimes Lutherans are tempted in that direction.  Just the Bible.  Even our own Confessions seem awkward to us.  What kind of authority do such creeds and confessions have?  Are we not Bible alone people?  It is as if this has influenced the idea that an educated clergy, especially one schooled in the Biblical languages and well taught in history and theology, is almost a problem rather than a blessing.  It just gets in the way, so to speak.  At least that is how some speak.  Online courses and a minimal sufficiency are not only all that is essential but all that needs be for the Church today.  In their push to let Scripture be alone, they have mistaken the idea that Lutherans do not believe that a churchly education is all that important against an urgent timeline and localization of belief and practice.  Is that who we are?  Does perspicuity or clarity mean that that the only skills or preparation the pastor brings to the table is administrative in nature or moral in shape?  Does this mean that all that talk of doctrine and faithful practice get in the way of a faithful clergy?  That is how it would seem if you listen to the current debate over online courses and non-synodical seminaries.  Give them the Bible and that is all that they need to serve the people today and the people in the pews know best what kind of pastor they want and need and how he should be trained. 

History says otherwise.  Henry Melchior Muhlenberg found doctrinal and liturgical chaos on the American frontier.  Not even a century later, CFW Walther complained that Lutherans in America did not know who they were, what they believed, or how they worshiped.  Even after the work of building seminaries and producing the Common Service, Graebner lamented the liturgical chaos in Lutheranism and suggested it was not simply about worship but also about what is believed.  The Church is not extraneous here but essential.  The teaching of the authority does not compete with Scripture but flows from Scripture as the Word is confessed and taught not as the opinion of one but as the catholic and apostolic faith, always and everyone believed and confessed.  Is our age now different?  Have we outgrown the need for the authority of the Church or a well trained clergy?  Our chaos today is in many respects the same as before.  We need the teaching authority of the Church not to replace Scripture but to unfold its truth against that which has been faithfully confessed and taught through the ages and we need an educated clergy who know the Word and who know both the challenges and the orthodox rudder that has maintained this truth through the stormy waters.

Luther was led to attack the Roman hermeneutic because it assumed an obscurity in Scripture which had to be penetrated by an allegorical or analogical interpretation by the magisterium of the external church.  At the same time Luther harshly attacked Rome for arrogating to itself alone the office of interpreting an obscure Scripture, he turns right about and attacks the radical reformers for indulging in private interpretation which ignores the general consensus of the church, the rules of good grammar, reason under the guidance of the Spirit, and the internal testimony of Scripture itself.  Either Scripture is clear or it is a dark book meant for the hallowed halls of the scholar but not for the ordinary Christian.  The clarity of Scripture must never be confused with simplicity or comprehensibility.  Luther would be most impatient with modern Lutherans who are preoccupied with a "simple" Gospel and who contend for a minimally trained clergy as a misuse of his words. For Luther the Gospel is the highest and most profound majesty. It is not simple. But it is clear and can be understood as to its meaning especially in matters of salvation.  What Scripture says is clear enough but what it means is the ministry of the Church and the clergy.  It means doctrine.  To fail to make the jump between what it says and what it means is the failure of Protestantism at the time of the Reformation and now in our world of vagaries and uncertainty.  We have the Word not to do with as we please but so that it might reveal to us the saving truth or doctrine by which we are saved and how we then live.  All dogmatics must be exegesis; and all exegesis must be systematic and dogmatic. In this way, our work, our confession, is exegesis. This is our confession of the clear Word of God."  What it means to be Lutheran is this disciplined approach to Scripture - both homiletically and
dogmatically.  This is why we have such high standards for an educated clergy and why we refuse to surrender the authority of the Church to the whim of the individual.

Second thoughts. . .

The media has not been kind to us in the LCMS.  I am not here speaking of its treatment of us as much as our treatment of it.  We have used the media in so many less than helpful ways and it has created a number of ill effects that do not bode well for the future.  Perhaps it is an appropriate moment to talk about it.

The media usage of the LCMS about the LCMS has been either to enlarge expectations and the reach of what Lutheranism can be and should be by extolling our good Confession OR it has been to diminish the reality of what Lutheranism is by exposing what is bad and making it known.  Some might see any difference.  I think there is a difference.

It is easy, after all, to expose what is bad or shameful among us.  We have no shortage of errors, scandals, and wrongs which rightfully shame us.  We are a church of sinners, after all.  One does not have to look very far to find good examples of such sin within the churches and clergy.  We are also well equipped to publish the record of our disappointments and embarrassments.  The subject of our outrage at those among us who live on the fringes of orthodoxy or morality or simple appropriateness is a fond one to take up and put pen to paper (or, in this case, words to a screen).  Some of it not only does not belong in public outrage but belongs in the more nuanced places where reason and due process live.  These things are not efficient but are slow and deliberate and prodding.  None of us is happy about this but it is probably better for all that the mechanisms of dealing formally with our discontent are not quick.  Part of that is because we seem to want to fix everything with bylaws and bylaws simply cannot fix much of what is wrong among us.  We crave decisive actors and actions except when someone is complaining about us.  I get it.

We are not so well equipped to utilize the resources of the internet for reasoned conversation or civil debate but even less so in praising what is good or convincing each other what is right and salutary.  There are some who do just that.  They are positive and build up more than they tear down.  From podcast to blog to talk show they lay before us in humble expectation the cause of Scripture, creed, confession, and truth.  I laud them for what they do and know that this is to good effect.  I cannot count how many have given my own congregation a try because they heard the Word proclaimed and of a church body in which this proclamation was normal and normative.  I only wish there were more who were intent upon using the various platforms available to convince rather then ratting out in public what they find wrong.  I may seem to do the same but it is not truly my intent to be a tell all site but rather to prod us even by our wrongs to do what is right.  I apologize when I do something else.

There is one thing the internet seems ill-quipped to do.  It is a terrible place for a real conversation, for the expression of nuance, for respect for process, and for the discipline that ought to be common but is about as uncommon as common sense.  The internet is good at putting us against each other and into camps of those who disagree and who refuse to be moved from where they stand.  There was a time when I regularly participated in a couple of such online forums but they ended up in stalemates over predictable arguments and it grew tiresome and tragic even to participate.  I am genuinely surprise when comments made on social media are not designed either to throw red meat to the hungry wolves or inflame the dragons among us.  It ought to be the other way around.  Moral outrage with its implicit self-righteousness should not be the norm but the exception.  Or at least I wish it were.

We are accountable to each other in this Synod and we are duty bound to observe the covenants of love that define our relationship but I am not at all sure it is good or helpful to turn us into spies who take to the web to tell all about the sins and failings of others.  I would not be ELCA if it were the final remnant of Lutheranism left but I really am saddened by what it has become.  It is a real tragedy and I cannot but grieve the loss of better predecessor bodies than what their merger became.  Likewise, I am saddened by what Anglicanism has become and what even the seven sisters of Protestantism became in view of what they were once.  I do not want a small but purer Missouri.  I want a growing Missouri which is growing because it is more and more faithful to Scripture, creed, and confession.  I do not want those whose potshots at our church body have sullied our reputation even more to shame us from being truthful and orthodox. Neither do I want us to become a caricature of our pompous selves as those outside us view the Synod and prove correct the stereotype of us as a people who love cutting down more than we can tolerate building up.  I hope the new year bring a little regret for how quick we are to shame each other in public as the first step we take when something is not as it should be.  I pray that in the New Year we will learn how to talk together in pursuit of the fuller orthodoxy and catholicity that is our prayer and not simply to boil things down to the minimum we can all agree upon.

Indeed, the whole point of moderated comments on this blog was to derail the side conversations that became nothing more than rude shouting matches.  This does not glorify God or extend the cause of Christ.  Yes, we must be blunt when wrongs are left without correction from those so charged with these duties yet we should not delight in being the first to publish how bad some of us are.  That is why I am hoping some of those who do that will take a pause from hitting the publish button.  We need have a higher purpose in all of this than delighting in the sins of others or we are Pharisees and Publicans all. 

An Unbroken History. . .

I read a while ago of a Lutheran's story of becoming Roman Catholic.  In it, she did not disparage her Lutheran past but found it lacking in many ways that Rome fulfilled.  Her story is not unlike many I know of people who love the doctrine of Lutheranism but who cannot seem to resist the mystique of Rome.  They sometimes bounce back and forth, yearning for a real sermon and catechetical teaching and finding it in the Church of the Augsburg Confession but then longing for a piety and devotional life (and ceremonial) that seems to be lacking in Wittenberg but is often overplayed in Rome.  They wear the scapular and medals and pray the discipline of the Rosary while their mind lives in the Lutheran Confessions and Luther's Catechism.  Some may find this odd.  I don't.  Some may complain about them and their seeming dissatisfaction but I don't.  Some may say they are not really Lutheran enough but I don't.  I am deeply sympathetic and find myself echoing some of their praises and laments of Lutheranism.

One such line that stuck out to me was that they were searching for a church with an unbroken history.  Rome seems the default in this.  After all, they have a line of popes and the choice real estate of the Vatican and all but this is where I think Lutherans fail.  We did not ever claim that the Church had ceased to exist in its Babylonian Captivity or in its exile from Scripture and the clear preaching of the Gospel.  Not at all.  But neither did we ever claim that we were a new church with new doctrine, new ceremonies, and a new ministry.  In fact, the claim of the Augustana that is the most bold is the very one we seem to shy away from today.  That claim is that we have not only NOT departed from catholic doctrine and practice but insist that we will change if it can be shown that we have.  This is the implicit claim not to be a catholic communion along side others but to be that catholic and apostolic Church that has such an unbroken history of faith, doctrine, teaching, exegesis, sacraments, piety, and worship.  If there is a distinct and uniform failing among all Lutherans today, it is our retreat from that claim and that identity.

Lutherans of all stripes seem to have accepted that they are a church with a date of founding that came fifteen centuries after Christ.  On the left, they have embraced the lie of our false ecumenism in which no one has all the truth, the most profound truth is diversity, and the only real unity is unity in diversity.  So they are content to live as step-sisters in a house without a Father and in which Christ is not Savior nor even really Brother but merely example of embodied love.  They look at the Church as if she were a mismatched set of paraments and vestments, more reflecting preference and identities of the people than the Christ or the Church established by His death and resurrection.  They commune anyone and everyone without even expecting baptism much less any real common creed or confession.  Their understanding of Church is a fragile negotiated peace in which everyone keeps their own distinctives so long as they do not contradict one another.  Of course, their most sacred tenets of faith insist upon the full embrace of the various sexual desires and gender identities -- even more than the two natures of Christ!  They do not care who has the unbroken history because they are the church of now, of a Scripture and doctrine unfolded in the present and not rooted in the past -- much less the preserved deposit once delivered.

Lest the right get too smug, they are equally as wedded to a beginning rooted in the sixteenth century and to a slightly less modern version of truth.  They have made peace with the idea that somehow the Church was left by God to live in error for nearly 1500 years before somebody came along to get it right.  Even those who appreciate the saints who went before whose words and witness accords with the claims of the Reformers do not use that much more than a footnote to the real things that matter because they were said or written by Luther or the great teachers of Lutheran orthodoxy.  They want to know not what is catholic or apostolic but what is Lutheran.  So they disdain ordination, for example, as mere apostolic custom -- as if that meant nothing much at all.  They live with high words but a practical worship life and piety built upon adiaphora in which the things that cannot be commanded are therefore unimportant.  They are too quick to caution against any outward piety and dismiss it all as if it meant nothing in order to focus on the intricacies of lectionary debates or the use of non-Lutheran hymns or third use of the Law as if these were the mighty questions of the time (not that these are neither interesting nor useful discussions).   No, it seems to me that the real vexing question for Lutherans today is if we are who our Confessions claim or not.  Under worship wars and communion hospitality and catechesis and preaching, this is the most urgent and profound question.

I will say upfront that I have no interest in belonging to any Church which claims a founding date later than the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  I have no interest in departing from the unbroken history of such Church, her doctrine and her life.  I wish I could say that Rome was in better shape to claim this because it would be a simple matter of swimming the Tiber.  The reality is that Rome is has institutionalized the whole idea of invention whether by pope or council or bishop or the mere toleration of teaching and practice that contradicts historic claim.  It was, in Luther's idea, a church of novelty that was remarkably successful in making their novelties appear to be catholic -- from purgatory to a justification by grace through faith that still deposits meritorious work to the assent of the Christian to treasuries of merits (which surely would have been depleted by now!) to papal infallibility invented 23 years after the Missouri Synod organized to idiots appointed or tolerated as bishops but who obviously hate the faith and the people they serve.  Rome has the mystique but little more.  Its doctrine is an evolution of reason and human idea that has neither root in Scripture nor the catholic witness of the fathers.  Orthodoxy has much to its appeal but the reality is that its history ended nearly 1200 years ago and it seems content to live with the remnants of that past along with its many ethnic identities.  If Orthodoxy every got its act together, it could be more attractive but I am not Greek or Russian or Slavic and my mind and heart too Western to have anything more than a passing desire for the East.

The woman who let her Lutheranism for Rome seems happy but she lives with one of those idiot bishops who disdains history and tradition.  I could not.  But neither am I happy with any Lutheranism that refuses to live up to or abide by the claims of our Confessions.  For anyone with half a wit understands that the claims of those Confessions are to be that Church with an unbroken history.  Sadly, we no longer even really complain that Rome has co opted that.  Instead, too many of us sit idly by content to be Protestants with reason and culture to live above Scripture as long as it fits what we are thinking.  The reality is that to be that Church with an unbroken history is neither comfortable nor contentment.  It is the constant battle less against the agents outside than with the voice inside and the unending struggle to be faithful.  It is this I am looking for and I suspect I am not alone.  The miracle is that there are literally Lutherans in nearly every denomination -- they just don't know it.  They want what I want -- a Church informed and bounded by Scripture, living in unbroken history and continuity with her past, in the vibrant and profound moment of sacramental life gathered around the Word and Table of the Lord, with an external piety to set them apart and express what the mind knows and the heart believes, and sure that this is more important than any cause of relevance or success bestowed by the world.