Brett Meyer has left a new comment on your post "Fix the FoundationsInstead of Painting Over the Cr...":
I read an article today by Pastor John Drickamer on whether aborted babies go to heaven or hell. He rightly stated that without the Means of Grace, the Word working through Baptism, the children remained dead in original sin, separated from God and condemned.
It struck me how this relates to the Lutheran Synod's promotion of the false gospel of Universal Objective Justification. I've been at a loss to explain why the Lutheran laity and clergy do not violently revolt against their money financing abortions through Thrivent. They seem to get more upset if congregation members don't show up to a church cleaning party or bake sale.
Most Lutheran laity and clergy believe and teach that unborn babies who are either murdered through abortion or die of unavoidable causes go to heaven. There is no Scriptural or Confessional basis for this teaching and it goes against original sin and the Means of Grace.
In steps UOJ. Now that they believe and teach that everyone following Christ's atonement are already forgiven, justified, guiltless and fully reconciled to God, what's to fear from not being baptized into Christ? UOJ teaches the babies were forgiven and saved even if they don't cognitively believe it. UOJ teaches only the unpaid sin of unbelief damns and since they don't believe babies are capable of unbelief - they're all saved.
So an appeal to stop financing abortions through Thrivent will fall on deaf ears - those murdered babies are already saved.
http://www.exposingtheelca.com/uploads/2/4/2/8/2428588/the_elca_abortion_policy1.pdf
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LPC has left a new comment on your post "Fix the FoundationsInstead of Painting Over the Cr...":
B.M.
UOJ has horrible consequences to ethics as well. Since babies are already forgiven even before the means of grace, then the UOJer has no compelling reason to oppose the abortion of babies with disabilities - by doing so, one sends the baby straight to heaven and then skip the difficulty of living with disabilities.
It is horrible, it promotes antinomianism and all sorts of immoral/wicked philosophies.
LPC
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GJ - Brett and Lito are both right, and there is a Pentecostal-Babtist connection, too. I was at a CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) performance, brought there by a future WELS missionary. The non-Lutheran leader did some of that Pat Robertson "someone is going to be healed" business. He also said, "We know heaven is filled with all those aborted babies." The crowd cheered and clapped.
His claim was based on the anti-Sacramental, anti-infant baptism posture of Babtists and Pentecostals. Babies are born innocent, so if they are executed, they go to heaven, they imagine.
That strikes me as a very cheap way to become indifferent to the abortion massacre sponsored by American society since Roe vs. Wade.
UOJ provides the same kind of excuse, by claiming that babies are born justified (Eduard Preuss, quoted with approval by Robert Preus in his UOJ days). What astonished me about that particular assertion was Jack Cascione reprinting the essay as if that could be a good, Confessional piece to lock down the orthodoxy of UOJ.
Robert Preus:
"All this is put beautifully by an old Lutheran theologian of our church,
"We are redeemed from the guilt of sin; the wrath of God is appeased; all creation is again under the bright rays of mercy, as in the beginning; yea, in Christ we were justified before we were even born. For do not the Scriptures say: ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them?'’ This is not the justification which we receive by faith...That is the great absolution which took place in the resurrection of Christ. It was the Father, for our sake, who condemned His dear Son as the greatest of all sinners causing Him to suffer the greatest punishment of the transgressors, even so did He publicly absolve Him from the sins of the world when He raised Him up from the dead. "(Edward [sic] Preuss, The Justification of a Sinner Before God, pp. 14-15)
LCMS Seminary President Robert Preus, 1981.
Did anyone on the Concordia Seminary (Ft. Wayne) faculty see the insanity of that quotation? No wonder Eduard poped after seeing a brilliant red sunset. He was Eduard, not Edward, and Preuss with two s's, a distant relative of Robert.
Let me set the scene. I am baptizing a baby, by water and the Word, and he is already justified at birth? Why bother? Do I bend down and say, "You have to believe that you were already forgiven or it does not count. Could I see a hand up? Isn't that precious!"
My admonition to the congregation would be: "Little Damien was already justified, even before he was born. But he has made a decision today, so that he is not only forgiven, but also forgiven-forgiven."
The UOJ Stormtroopers would like everyone to think they are so much more doctrinal than ELCA, but they express the same Universalism in different terms. When a WELS pastor talks about the Gospel, he means UOJ or "pre-forgiveness" as Jeske recently claimed. When a pastor is abusing women and children in his flock, as one District President did, he is forgiven. But when a lowly miserable member or pastor calls him on it, that person is condemned to the uncharted depths of Hell.
The same Universalism which justifies the ELCA gay fest can be used to excuse the MLC gay video.
Pietism really caused the America to trust in abortions. It was better to end the life of an innocent baby than to face the sourpuss stares of the Pietists. When someone has said to me, "They had to get married," I always say, "Good, they gave life and a home to their baby, more chance than most get today."
Pietism is hot to condemn the wrong things. First of all, Pietism opposes doctrinal orthodoxy. That is like a physician opposing good medicine. It is not without cause that "sound doctrine" in the New Testament means "healthy doctrine" and false doctrine is "a cancer."
Pietism also has a constantly changing code of laws, where one action is the worst sin in the entire world, then modified in a few years, then dropped completely. Theatrical performances could be bad, so all theater was evil and a terrible sin to watch. Next, by reference, all movies were bad. Then some movies were bad. When a Methodist Pietistic minister was accused of going to a movie, he said, "I have to see what the devil is up to."
I grew up in an area where the future promoters of Church Growth (E. Free and E. Covenant, both based on Swedish Pietism) were deeply concerned about all dancing. A dance studio had its windows soaped over so no would would fall into Satan's snares while watching people learn the foxtrot. My teacher got in trouble for finding a open spot and--gasp!--looking into the dance studio. He caught it when he got home.
The Holiness Code (which never stayed the same, varying in denominations and eras) obscured the relationship between Law and Gospel. The Law condemned people for drunkenness, so the solution was more law - signing a pledge each year in church, "I will not touch a drop of alcohol." That made drinking alcohol a special temptation and the best way to drive parents nuts. The parents worried, "What will our friends and church members think if Buzz staggers home one night!"
The children or grandchildren learn the hypocrisy of Pietism and reject all of Christianity and any sense of morality. America moved from legalistic Pietism and the Holiness Code (no liquor sales on Sunday) to the feckless, Unitarian hedonism of today, where being stoned on meth is a basic human right.
If Pietism is a dirty word in the Lutheran Church, then UOJ should be too. UOJ, like Pietism, came direct from Halle University, the citadel of Pietism.
