The Catholic Momentum

I enjoy the encouraging messages sent. I mean the positive messages from normal people, but also the insanely angry messages sent under various false names. The second group motivates me the most, because, as my Grandpappy used to say, "When the arrow hits the mark, feathers will fly."

Various people pretend to be offended that I had a Catholic education, just like Martin Luther and the faculty of Concordia Seminary, Ft. Wayne. Look at the faculty list at Ft. Wayne. They live close to Notre Dame so they finished their Ph.D. work there. John Johnson, once the buddy of Herman Otten while serving as president of Concordia, St. Louis, had a doctorate from the Jesuits at St. Louis University. What the complainers miss is my lack of obedience to His Holiness, the Antichrist.

Faithful Lutheran pastors owe it to their congregations to be well read in heterodoxy without falling prey to it. That requires constant study while ignoring Holy Mother Synod most of the time.

The marginally literate have trouble distinguishing between hearing someone and following someone. Thus it is easy to find out who has studied at Fuller Seminary and Willow Creek because they blab about the same things with the same vocabulary. Waldo Werning had "Church Growth Eyes" in the subtitle of one of his moronic books. Did he study at Fuller? Yes, he admitted it and also denied it. Those who defend Fuller doctrine are predictably alumni (Frosty Bivens, David Valleskey, Lawrence Otto Olson, Wally Oelhaven, Fred Adrian, Kent Hunter). Those who follow have previously heard that new gospel, preached by angels of marketing (Galatians 1:8).

How Roman Catholic are the synods today? The best measure is to look at what they are doing. ELCA and the old Synodical Conference synods (WELS-ELS-LCMS) have:
1. Adopted the three-year lectionary from Rome.
2. Killed the traditional names of Sundays wherever possible.
3. Changed the liturgical colors to be more gay-friendly.
4. Competed to see which Roman Catholic customs they can incorporate.
5. Obsessed over the title bishop and Rome's claim to apostolic succession.
6. Longed for acceptance by Rome, even while called defective and wounded.

Many pastors have followed these trends because their peers were running off the cliff ahead of them. The Gadarene swine episode was not meant to be prescriptive, I might add. One pastor asked me to make my sermons fit the Roman cycle. I said, "Why not switch back to the historic pericopes?" The publishing houses make it easy to follow the worn path.

Lutheran worship can be solemn and liturgical without genuflecting toward Rome.