Chapter 6: Justification By Faith Assumes the Efficacy of the Word
Many people bewail the condition of the Lutheran church bodies in North America. The congregations and schools are failing, while the cost of a Lutheran education has quickly pushed that essential into the elitist category. Room, board, and tuition at my alma mater, Augustana, is now $40,000 per year. A Wisconsin Synod college is about $25,000 per year. To avoid the Ivy League cost of a Missouri Synod seminary, that synod offers alternative programs, reducing academic requirements and doctrinal training. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is facing massive defections from the expected results of teaching universal forgiveness and political activism for the last 50 years or more, including the pre-ELCA days of the LCA and ALC. The ELCA is so removed from historic Christianity that Carl Braaten is touted as a confessional dissenter, a dinosaur from the past, and he was always opposed in print to the articles of faith. The solutions offered to these problems are many and varied, all mistaken and bound to make matters worse.
More money will not help the so-called conservative Lutherans: the former members of the Synodical Conference, the Wisconsin Synod, the Missouri Synod, and the Evangelical Lutheran Synod. The extraordinary Marvin Schwan donations promoted even more apostasy and wasteful spending. The two main groups leaving the ELCA are happy to be free, but they seem to be intent on rolling back the clock a decade or two, meaning they will eventually arrive at the same point again, even if ELCA is even worse in all respects.
The issues debated are symptoms rather than causes. For example, women’s ordination is a symptom of teaching against the efficacy of the Word, a problem which is pandemic in all synods. The conservatives are working around the prohibition against female clergy, but they still present it as Law. “This is forbidden, so we will not do it.” They fail to teach male spiritual leadership as a positive response to the effectiveness of the Word. Women will always become default spiritual leaders if the men refuse to be leaders in their own homes, churches, and synods. Women pastors will always supplant male leadership, but male leadership will encourage the participation of men and women in receiving the blessings of the Means of Grace.
If God allows the world to continue another century, this blighted time will be known as Era of Gimmicks, or We Trust Everything Except the Word of God. How else can anyone explain that 99% of all Lutherans have leadership trained at Fuller Seminary, the home of Church Growth and the citadel of Emergent Church? Fuller graduates dominate the old Synodical Conference. The ELCA mission people have the same doctrinal DNA. They all share Enthusiasm, separating the Holy Spirit from the Word, not trusting the Word alone to accomplish God’s will. The foundation is not merely weakened – it is missing. Congregations and synods still live from the blessings of the past, when their leaders trust the Word, but that is quickly coming to an end.
Believers would love to see their church bodies engage in a serious study of the Book of Concord, but a corrupt corporation is bound to usurp a proper effort and turn it into Confessional Treasures and Sharing Your Treasures. When all the denominations tried to get together in the 19th century, which was called the Interchurch Movement, they agreed on one thing – raising money. They built the current building for the National Council of Churches and collapsed. In contrast, individuals today will need to take this study up on their own and rely on relatively few books. The correct attitude toward the Scriptures and the Book of Concord is needed.
Lutheran orthodoxy can be defined as simply as 1-2-3.
1. The Scriptures
First of all, the Scriptures are the very Word of God. The verses are individually the Voice of God. The entire Bible is one, unified truth – the Book of the Holy Spirit. But more than that, the Word works God’s will upon the person who studies it with an honest and sincere heart. We are weak, frail, impulsive creatures, tossed about by events and emotions, temptations and crises. The Word deepens our faith in God’s power - first to forgive our sins completely, secondly to guide our lives, and finally to bless us in many different ways. The most painful lesson is the cross. Lutherans easily use the phrase – Christ crucified for our sins. The difficult part is knowing the Word brings the cross, that this cross is a blessing. European Lutherans always taught, “No cross, no crown,” using a symbol of a cross surrounded by a crown. American Lutheran leaders teach, “No glory, no crown, no call.”
Lutheran leaders cannot be trusted to provide a decent English Bible because there is so much money in backing a bad translation, as they did with the NIV. Lutherans should study the translation closest to Luther’s, which is the Tyndale-King James Version. Those who find the older English of the KJV an obstacle can always start with a modern version of the KJV and compare it with the KJV, especially in the sections about the sacraments.[1]
2. The Confessions
The Book of Concord is not God’s Word but man’s witness to God’s Word. Lutherans are the only group where its leaders have put together a harmonious (Concordia) set of documents that defines their beliefs in relationship to the historic Church of the ages. When we read the Book of Concord, we are not saying, “This makes us Lutheran,” but “This is the universal, correct Christian faith, as revealed in the Sacred Scriptures.”
The greatest theologians in the history of Christianity wrote the Book of Concord, but lazy pastors and members call it “irrelevant, old-fashioned, and boring.” Martin Luther and Martin Chemnitz are the greatest theologians of the Christian Church, not just the Lutheran Church. Melanchthon and Chytraeus are the third and fourth greatest. When people view the Book of Concord as their most compact and useful one-volume Bible commentary, they start to see its value. The Triglotta is the best version, and the Tappert is the best portable version, along with the Heiser English-only Triglotta.
Bente’s Historical Introductions to the Book of Concord are modular, just like the Confessions. A student of Christian doctrine can read about one controversy at a time, or study an infinitely detailed description of the origin of the Confessions. The Introductions only come with the Triglotta, so owning the big green volume is essential.
3. Luther’s Sermons
Luther has 30 volumes of sermons in the Weimar Edition. I question whether many volumes in the American Edition Luther’s Works are read thoroughly. They look good on a pastor’s shelf, even better in a District President’s bookcase. Believers should begin with Luther’s Sermons, always going back to them, to read and digest their spiritual wisdom. Luther’s Reformation was a revolution in preaching, a rebirth of the sermon, and Luther believed in the power of the sermon. He said, “If you cannot preach an entire hour, preach at least 30 minutes.”
Luther’s devotion to the sermon itself, even more than his incredible number of publications, was based upon his consistent belief in the efficacy of the Word alone.
The preaching of this message may be likened to a stone thrown into the water, producing ripples which circle outward from it, the waves rolling always on and on, one driving the other, till they come to the shore. Although the center becomes quiet, the waves do not rest, but move forward. So it is with the preaching of the Word. It was begun by the apostles, and it constantly goes forward, is pushed on farther and farther by the preachers, driven hither and thither into the world, yet always being made known to those who never heard it before, although it be arrested in the midst of its course and is condemned as heresy.[2]
For that reason we ought to know Luther’s theology first through his sermons and use them to deepen our understanding of the Word. If Lutheran pastors and laity are so busy, why do they take the time to read drivel when they can study the greatest of all Christian writers?
A handy, attractive, and inexpensive edition of Luther’s Sermons can be obtained from Grand Rapids – of all places. The Lenker set and the Klug set are combined in seven volumes. They are also an incentive for preaching from the Historic Pericopes instead of the Roman Catholic three-year cycle. The ministers who need more insights have two to four sermons for each observance in the church year. The laity have the same advantage.
God’s Only Method – The Means of Grace
Man may arrange convention votes to obtain a temporary document in opposition to God’s Word, but those efforts based on trickery, collusion, bribes, and threats do not produce the truth. God forgives only through the efficacious Word in the Means of Grace. That forgiveness is not like man’s where past sins are dredged up and rehearsed. With God’s justification, they are removed from man completely. First of all, God has graciously provided the payment for our sins in the crucifixion of His Only-Begotten Son. Then He has appointed the Holy Spirit to give us this treasure to us through His Word and Sacraments.
Believing in Christ is forgiveness. The universal atonement of Christ is God’s action. Preaching the Gospel is arranged and guided by God. God creates trust through this faithful preaching of the Gospel Promises, and that Word-energized faith receives what God offers so freely.
God has provided the Means of Grace as His only method, yet congregations and pastors make themselves so busy doing other things that they neglect the sermon, hide Holy Communion, and move Holy Baptism out of prime time. Nothing reveals modern hatred for the Word more than a rumpled minister in casual clothes, copying a Groeschel sermon and graphics, serving popcorn and cola, and entertaining the audience with rock music.
Ministers and members must return to the motto of Luther – that faithfulness is success, that God will bring about His will through the Word and in no other way. For that reason a major part of the week must be set aside for studying the Word and Confessions, preparing the sermon carefully, broadcasting it as freely as possible, a pun based on Mark 4 and reliant on the new printing press, the Internet.
Congregations must become as proud of the sacraments as they are of the parking lot, carillon, and pit band. Every service should provide Holy Communion for all those members who wish to receive this medicine for the soul. Closed communion should be taught as a reflection of how powerful the Word is to condemn faithless reception, how powerful in preparing us for eternal life.
Every baptism should be a major part of the service, reflected upon in the sermon and aided with appropriate printed materials. Let every opponent of infant baptism and infant faith squirm helplessly while the Promises of God are proclaimed, for faith makes us bold. In large print, have the bulletin say “Baptism now saves” (1 Peter 1:21) and “Unless one believes as a child…”
No one needs to look for the cross when the pure Word is taught. The cross will be laid upon our shoulders, surely a milder and small cross than the Savior bore. If we ever doubt the survival of the Old Adam in the midst of the Means of Grace, the pinching and scraping of the cross as we complain will remind us. Like the grief that speaks hope form the Gospel about eternal life, the pain of the cross will transform sorrow into joy, showing that the precious, holy cross is indeed the work of God.
[1] The Baptists and Pentecostals—who are the natural market for the updated KJVs—are also the very people who do not like “Baptism now saves you” and “communion with the Body of Christ.”
[2] Sermons of Martin Luther, 8 vols., ed., John Nicholas Lenker, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1983, III, p. 202. Ascension Day Mark 16:14-20.
