Teach and urge these things. If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain. (1 Timothy 6:3-5 ESV)
[The following "newsletter article" was assigned during a course on American Lutheran history.]
Have you ever wondered about the label
“Lutheran” (and why/how, if you are reading this in a Lutheran church
newsletter, it most likely applies to you)? Have you ever wondered about why of
our own church body, The Lutheran Church
– Missouri Synod, is so named? Have you ever wondered—or perhaps you were
never told—why there are nearly three dozen strands (for lack of a better word)
of practicing Lutherans nationwide (that’s more than 8 million Americans),
rather than just one post-Reformation, American brand of Lutheranism.
Surely, even the least frequent
church-going Lutheran knows where the designation comes from—Dr. Martin Luther hated
that any new form of church should carry his brand, so to speak; Luther meant,
at least at the onset 500 years ago, to merely make his beloved Roman Catholic
Church aware that its improprieties, excesses, and false doctrine obscured the
Gospel message and, therefore, its primary mission. (I think the last thing he
meant to do was foment a Protestant insurrection that would result in
suffering, death, and the fracturing of believers into squabbling sects of
differing Christian doctrine.)
It was this Protestant Reformation that
tempered those followers of Luther into the first Lutherans, those who agreed
with Luther’s teaching, doctrine, and practice, the basis for our Lutheran
Confessions, the 1580 Book of Concord. This compendium of 10 confessional
documents is the backbone of orthodox Lutheranism and is still upheld by The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod as
“the true and binding exposition of Holy Scripture and serve as authoritative
texts for all pastors [and] congregations”; however, and unfortunately, not all
Lutheran church bodies in America share such an unconditional subscription.
And, ironically, the very book that was meant to keep Lutherans together (concordia is Latin for “one heart”), is
at the very “heart” of what would divide the first Lutherans to call themselves
American in the early- to mid-19th century.
Between 1840 and 1875 there were
approximately 60 organized Lutheran church bodies in the United States made up
of European immigrants (and their descendants) primarily from Germany, Norway,
and Sweden. A fledgling Lutheran presence in the 17th century of
Dutch (New York), Swedish (Delaware), and German (Pennsylvania) settlers would
eventually give rise in the next century to the first permanent Lutheran “synod”
in America, the ethnically German Ministerium
of Pennsylvania in 1748. The Latin word ministerium
(a group of ministers), would soon give way to a more regular use of the
anglicized form of the Greek word synodos,
from syn- (together) + hodos (way), meaning assembly or
meeting. (Thus The Luther Church –
Missouri Synod.)
Author and professor of church history,
Mark Granquist, writes in his 2015 book Lutherans in America, that “by 1720,
Lutherans had been in North America for about a century…especially in the
middle [British] colonies.” In 1740 there was still no English language
Lutheran worship—there were Lutherans scattered about. Lutheranism in America
was still wholly unorganized. The formation of the Pennsylvania ministerium was
founded on Pietism, a German form of Lutheranism that placed the burden of
salvation on Man over God’s grace, and condemned formal Christianity that
accepted church attendance and reception of the sacrament as an indication of
real discipleship and denounced a simple assent to doctrine or a verbal
affirmation of confessions or creeds as evidence of true faith. And so the
“founding fathers” of the first synod in Pennsylvania tried to blend Pietism and
orthodox Lutheran Confessions into a prototypical and distinctly model of American
Lutheranism. Over the next 100 years, this model would be shaped and reshaped
by the culture of the times, as Lutherans in America would be impacted by other
Protestant church movements, particularly Baptist and Methodist, as well as the
revivalism that grew out of mission work on the western frontier.
By 1830, English was the preferred language
of worship among American Lutheran synods, which were continuing to grow
exponentially. In the mid-1800s, Pietism was the undercurrent for much of the
anti-Roman Catholic sentiment and a fundamental reason that some of the
contents of the Confessions were seen as no longer relevant, especially the original
or “unaltered” Augsburg Confession (drafted to address specific abuses in the
Roman Catholic Church). It was into this backdrop of controversy and
competition that The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod came on the scene in
1847. Our synod—confessional, ethnically Saxon, German-speaking, and fiercely
conservative—began to grow in the Midwest, amid arguments with other synods
over unconditional acceptance of the Confessions. There were other
controversies, too, such as differing opinions on the doctrines of Election and
Real Presence (both topics better addressed separately in future newsletter
articles).
Granquist reports that Lutherans in America
grew to be the third-largest Protestant church group from 600,000 baptized in
1875 to more than 2 million by 1900, segregated mostly by ethnicity, rather
than doctrine. But that would change as not only doctrine, but semantics would
create a chasm between the two largest Lutheran church bodies in the U.S. in
the 1920s, the more liberal United Lutheran Church of America (ULCA), with its
roots in the Pennsylvania Ministerium of 1748 (and created through a series of
mergers; through more mergers, it would eventually become a shadow of today’s
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America or ELCA), and the Missouri Synod.
While there had been great hope and
enthusiasm for a united Lutheran front in America, at least on the part of the
ULCA, the controversy over doctrinal subscription would keep the notion of one
united American Lutheran Church body beyond arm’s reach. Granquist notes that
“most of the midwestern Lutheran groups were generally sympathetic to the use
of the terms inerrant and infallible, both because they believed
it correctly expressed the nature of biblical authority and because it brought
them into harmony with the Missouri Synod on the issue.” The ULCA and others
resisted using these terms, and another Lutheran body at the time, the American
Lutheran Church, used one, but not the other. The ULCA tried again in 1949 for
national unity among the numerous Lutheran bodies, but to no avail.
We in The
Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod consider ourselves orthodox Lutherans, as
we accept the Scriptures as the inspired and inerrant Word of
God, and we subscribe unconditionally to all the symbolical books of the
Evangelical Lutheran Church as a true and unadulterated statement and
exposition of the Word of God. There are other Lutherans in America who claim
the same stance (such as the Wisconsin Synod, the 3rd largest
Lutheran body), but other issues, such as type of hymnal, gender identity,
roles of men and women in church, and form of church government, keep us apart.
Honestly, it’s very difficult to translate
the label “Lutheran” into a specific description. Of the 30 or so bodies in
America, it’s also very difficult to decipher why one operates to the exclusion
of others; in The Lutheran Church –
Missouri Synod, altar and pulpit fellowship (who is invited to the Lord’s
Supper, who is allowed to preach) is based predominately upon “confessional
unity.” Is the communicant confessionally sound? Does he or she agree with the
Lutheran Confessions as contained in the Book of Concord? Or even know what the
Book of Concord is? Does he or she agree with the teachings of our Synod? Can
any ordained Lutheran pastor preach from our pulpit?
As a vivid example of the fence between the
Missouri Synod and the largest American Lutheran body, the ELCA, comes directly
from its website in these statements which they contend justifies their altar
fellowship with the Presbyterian Church (USA), Reformed Church in America,
United Church of Christ, The Episcopal Church, The Moravian Church, and United
Methodist Church:
“Full communion is when two denominations
develop a relationship based on a common confessing of the Christian faith and
a mutual recognition of Baptism and sharing of the Lord’s Supper. This does not
mean the two denominations merge; rather, in reaching agreements, denominations
also respect differences.”
I know, all of this perhaps presents our
Synod as proprietary among other Lutherans, even among other Christian
denominations; however, when the very confessional documents that were presented
during the Reformation by Luther and his colleagues and followers to defend
God’s Word are altered, ignored, or simply forgotten because popular culture
and society deem them legalistic or no longer relevant…well, there can never be
unity as long as the world, not God, influence the direction of the Church. It
is sad, even regrettable, that the label Lutheran doesn’t hold the same
definition for each Christian who wears it.
In
the end, our Lutheran label is not as important as our defense of the truth in
the face of false doctrine and misleading practice. Our confessions as an
exposition of Scripture neither add to or take away from God’s word. If this
were the case among all the “Lutherans” in the world, then…well, you get the
idea.
С Богом, ya'll.
