Comment Link: http://steadfastlutherans.org/?p=4190#comment-279655
Author: Joe Krohn
Comment:
In January of 2011, a WELS pastor preached that our sins were forgiven before we were born; before we heard the Word of God; before our Baptisms. He stated during discussions that before we do anything, God has forgiven us. We challenged this teaching. We received many of the same ruinations that are prevalent here in defense of UOJ. So you see this is a big problem. It will eventually go one of two ways. Either it will morph into full fledged universalism, or go back to the way Scripture and the Confessions speak of one Justification (the promise of forgiveness) that comes through faith, by Grace for Christ’s sake; as it has been since the fall of man in the garden.
The key to understanding justification is where the righteousness of Christ resides and how it is distributed. It is on Christ objectively FOR (not on) the world and becomes OURS (imputation) through faith by a hearing of the Word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit.
BTW…we were excommunicated for our confession and told we were in need of repentance. When we asked what commandment we broke, we were given no answer and told it was a fellowship issue. Excommunication is reserved for the unwillingness to repent for breaking the Law of God…the Ten Commandments.
***
GJ - The Unsteady Lutheran Enthusiasts ended up with a good discussion on their hands, because a wide variety defended the historical Christian faith instead of bowing to the UOJ bullies.
Jack Kilcrease--trained by ELCA, employed by Roman Catholics to teach religion to papists--gave away his profound ignorance of Lutheran theology by his repeated references to "the doctrine of Objective Justification." David Scaer and Paul McCain think he is the bomb.
The Lutheran Reformers avoided such terminology as "the doctrine of..." There is only one doctrine, a unified truth - in harmony with the entire witness of the Sacred Scriptures. Writing about "doctrines" in the plural suggests a modular view of Christianity, where some units can be changed, others dropped, and still others added.
That is exactly what happened in the aftermath of the Reformation. Calvinist influence merged the atonement with justification, first with Samuel Huber, who was rebuked and sent packing. Huber would be a Synod President today in the LCMS, WELS, or ELS.
The second wave of Calvinism came in the form of Spener's union efforts. The merging of atonement and justification came in the form of double justification, first taught by Georg Christian Knapp and later by F. Schleiermacher. Knapp, Schleiermacher, and Tholuck (Hoenecke's mentor)--all three at Halle--were pivotal figures in Protestant theology.
Ottomar Fuerbringer, Father of
Ludwig Fuerbringer, Father of
Fibby
Missouri Lutherans know how significant the Fuerbringer family was. Ottomar came over with the syphilitic bishop and married the widow of C. F. W. Walther's brother. Ludwig Fuerbringer was born of that union, became the senior pastor at Frankenmuth, after his father, and later professor and president of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. Ludwig's son Fibby was the president of the seminary who turned the campus over to the liberals, leading to Tietjen and Seminex (the first gay Lutheran seminary, chaired by Jungkuntz, from WELS).
Ottomar Fuerbringer was trained as a pastor but could not get a call in Europe because he was a Pietist. The Lutheran Church in the German states was rationalistic, with little or no tolerance for "Pietists and mystics," the disparaging terms used for believers. "Old Lutheran" is a term used in America for those who rejected the extremes of revivalism - no liturgy, no creeds, transforming people's lives with the Law.
The "Old Lutherans" were not orthodox - they were cell group Pietists who kept the worship forms of the Lutheran Church while adopting the fantasy that the cell groups were the real church.
Pietism is unionism, which draws people away from Lutheran doctrine, so anyone in a cell group church is headed out of the Lutheran fold, even though the individual may remain a Lutheran in name only.
Doctrinal indifference and disparaging the Means of Grace will always lead to Unitarian-Universalism or to Pentecostalism. Many WELS pastors have gone charismatic (ironic, eh?) while others like Jungkuntz and Gerke have gone Unitarian-Universalist.
