What is a Lutheran? I. INTRODUCTION

Transcription

1 I. INTRODUCTION What is a Lutheran? Two students at a Seminary were sitting at a table having lunch. One said to the other, Seminary is a good thing. It keeps the professors off the streets and gives them something to do. These students, perhaps, weren t so far off from Martin Luther s own comments. In the second of his eight sermons that he preached after returning from his protection program at the Wartburg Castle in 1522, Luther commented, I simply taught, preached, and wrote God s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept [cf. Mark 4:26 29], or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything. Had I desired to foment trouble, I could have brought great bloodshed upon Germany; indeed, I could have started such a game that even the emperor would not have been safe. But what would it have been? Mere fool s play. I did nothing; I let the Word do its work. 1 Aware of such a tradition, you can understand how I feel that I should answer the question, What does it mean to be Lutheran very, very carefully. After all, Luther himself tells us in his explanation to the Lord s Prayer that despite our human plans and schemes, God s reign breaks into our world with or without us. 2 In that sense, our Lutheranism doesn t matter at all. All that matters is God s Word, as God proclaims unconditional Grace and forgiveness through Christ our Lord. If that Word is proclaimed in our world and in our communities, we are in good shape. The prophet Isaiah puts this same sentiment very bluntly: The Word of the Lord does not return empty. 3 God can bring about life and salvation with or without our current version of Lutheranism, the Lutheran church, or even the ELCIC (Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada). In one sense, then, being Lutheran doesn t matter whatsoever. What does matter is what God does and says for us and for our salvation. 4 The rest is just icing on the cake. On another level, however, the core teachings and insights of the Lutheran reformation matter for our very life and salvation. But I worry that these core insights are being tossed aside as people trade in their Lutheranism for a generic form of Christianity that offends no one. And I have problems with that, if it means that the baby is thrown out 1 Martin Luther, Luther s Works: American Edition, Edited by Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald and Helmut T. Lehmann (St. Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia Publishing House and Fortress Press, ), 55 Volumes. Volume 51: Martin Luther, Small Catechism, II.7-8, as found in, Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., The Book of Concord : The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000). 3 For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. Isaiah 55:10-11 (NRSV). 4 This phrase, of course, comes from the Nicene Creed. In his commentary on John 1:4, Luther echoes the importance of this action of God: With a cheerful heart I may declare: I believe in Jesus Christ, God s only Son, who sits on His right hand as my Advocate. He is of my flesh and blood; yes, He is my Brother. For us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven, became incarnate, and died for our sins. Luther s Works, 22:

2 with the bath, or baptismal, water. So I am left to wonder: does being Lutheran still matter? Before we can answer the question, however, I think we need to take a step back and answer two preliminary questions. First, what do we mean by Lutheran, and second, matter for what? II. BEING LUTHERAN Very early in his career, Luther started reacting against the use of the label Lutheran. He did not like the label, and so he stated, I ask that people make no reference to my name; let them call themselves Christians, not Lutherans. 5 What is Luther? After all, the teaching is not mine [John 7:16]. Neither was I crucified for anyone [I Cor. 1:13]. St. Paul, in I Corinthians 3, 6 would not allow the Christians to call themselves Pauline or Petrine, but Christian. How then should I poor stinking maggot-fodder 7 that I am come to have people call the children of Christ by my wretched name? Not so, my dear friends; let us abolish all party names and call ourselves Christians, after him whose teaching we hold. 8 Being Lutheran did not matter to Martin Luther at all. In fact, he tried get rid of the label. He knew it was used in a derogatory manner by his opponents, and he used the title the same way himself. In his mind, the label Lutheran got in the way of being Christian. His whole focus was on confessing Christ, and being captured by God s grace. To focus on him would be idolatry. At the same time, however, while he was more than willing to get rid of the name Lutheran, he was not willing to let go of the incredible teaching that he had discovered in the pages of scripture God s amazing grace. Thus, a few months after Luther had rallied against the use of the name of Lutheran, he wrote: True, by any consideration of body or soul you should never say: I am Lutheran, 9 or Papist. For neither of them died for you you should confess yourself a Christian. But if you are convinced that Luther s teaching is in accord with the gospel and that the pope s is not, then you should not discard Luther so completely, lest with him you discard also his teaching, which you nevertheless recognize as Christ s teaching. You should rather say: Whether Luther is a rascal or a saint I do not care; his teaching is not his, but Christ s.... It 5 The editor explains, Just a few months later in his Receiving Both Kinds in the Sacrament (1522) Luther reiterated this position but with the important qualification that disavowal of the name Lutheran is tantamount to a disavowal of Christ if you are convinced that Luther s teaching is in accord with the gospel. Luther s Works 36, 265 note I Corinthians 3:22; See also I Corinthians 1:12 and I Corinthians3:4. 7 As the editor note: Madensack, literally, bag of worms, was a favorite term of Luther for designating the perishable body, the mortal man. Luther s Works, 45:70, note 38 (A Sincere Admonition By Martin Luther To All Christians To Guard Against Insurrection And Rebellion, 1522) 8 Luther s Works, 45:70-71 (A Sincere Admonition By Martin Luther To All Christians To Guard Against Insurrection And Rebellion, 1522) 9 As the editor notes, By this time, in 1522, the word lutherisch was already in extensive use, not only as a possessive adjective and a predicate adjective, but even in the form of a substantive as the name of a new religious party. It was used first and most particularly by Luther s enemies, but also by his friends (despite his repudiation of it) and by the population generally. Cf. Alfred Goetze, Lutherisch; Zeitschrift für deutsche Wortforschung, Edited by Friedrich Kluge (Straßburg: Trübner Verl., 1902), Volume 3, As found in Luther s Works 36:265, note

3 is on account of the teaching that they attack you and ask you whether you are Lutheran. 10 The name of Lutheran has stuck, however, even when Lutherans after him sometimes ignore his Gospel discoveries. Thus, near the end of his life, all he could do was laugh about the absurdity of it all. At one point, he tells a humorous story he heard from Justus Jonas, a close friend of his who was serving as a pastor in Halle, Germany. As Luther tells it: Once when there was a procession with banners around a church, [someone] put the pot of holy water on the ground. A dog came along and peed into [it]. A priest noticed this and he said, You impious dog! Have you become a Lutheran too? 11 So I would echo Martin Luther and say that the label of Lutheran does not matter. It is a poorly chosen label. It detracts from Luther s focus on Jesus Christ, the one who proclaims and makes real God s radical and amazing grace in our world, and through whom we are drawn into God the Father, and the Holy Spirit. Yet the label Lutheran points to an important and particular way of being Christian. For it was precisely Luther s way of defining the heart of the Christian faith that landed him in hot water with the Roman Catholic Church, of which he was a faithful member. From the Roman Catholic perspective, the label Lutheran was derogatory because it stood for the heresy that salvation could not be earned by good behaviour or piety. They felt Luther was dangerous because he questioned the Roman insistence on placing morality and obedience to the institutional church in the primary place of importance. Luther was dangerous because he rejected their cleverly designed marketing plan to buy indulgences, and thus, salvation. So what is crucial to Lutheranism? We have to answer that question before we can explore whether it matters. III. THE CORE OF LUTHERANISM I would argue that at the heart of what it means to be Lutheran is not the rallying phrase, sola scriptura (Scripture only), even though many have come to associate the reformation with this emphasis. Rather, at the heart of what it means to be Lutheran is summed up in the phrase: God is at the centre (theo-centrism). Let me explain what I mean. 1). God is at the Centre Despite the emphasis on the Lutheran teaching of justification by God s grace alone through faith alone (a tough phrase to understand), as Luther trumpets it, I would argue that this revelation came about because of another, more central discovery by Luther. Some have called this discovery the Copernican revolution of the reformation. If you remember, Copernicus discovered that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun rather than the other way around. Likewise, Luther discovered that life and salvation 10 Luther s Works 36: (Receiving Both Kinds in the Sacrament, 1522). 11 Luther s Works, 54:421 (Letters, No. 5418: A Story about a Dog who Was Lutheran, Between April 11 and June 14, 1542). -3-

4 revolve around God rather than us. God alone gives life. God alone can give salvation. God is the centre of life, not us. That is why Luther defined sin as being curved in on ourselves. Or, as someone else has put it, There are three letters in the word sin, and in the very middle of sin is I. Therein lies the problem. The common phrase today is It s all about me. But when it s all about me, we push God out of the centre of our lives and our world. Everything revolves around us. This was also the first, or original, sin of Adam and Eve. They wanted to be gods in God s place. The tempter in the garden convinced Adam and Eve that if they just ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they could be just like God. It was an offer that was too good to refuse. Who wouldn t want to be like God? In an insightful letter to Elector John the Steadfast s secretary and chancellor George Spalatin, just after the Augsburg Confession had been presented in Augsburg in 1530, Luther was concerned about how this mountain top experience would affect his colleague, Philip Melanchthon. Luther writes to Spalatin; Be strong in the Lord, and on my behalf continuously admonish Philip not to become like God, but to fight that innate ambition to be like God, which was planted in us in paradise by the devil This [ambition] doesn t do us any good. It drove Adam from paradise, and it alone also drives us away, and drives peace away from us. In summary: we are to be human and not God; it will not be otherwise. 12 Luther understood the problem clearly. God is God, and we re not. God s in control, and we re not. It s that simple. It s the same today. We don t like anyone having control over us. In a sense, then, we are engaged in a classic game of king of the castle with God. And only one of us can be at the top of the heap. God gets in our way, since we want the world to revolve around us, not God. This competition to be king of the castle, however, is sin. It demands that God will either do what we want, or get out of the way. In either case, we stay in control. This is especially true of salvation. We want it dependent on what we do, so that we can stay in control rather than trusting what God does for us. As Luther explains in the Large Catechism, Anything on which your heart relies and depends, I say, that is really your God. 13 We rely and depend upon ourselves, and thus become our own gods. For example, one of the reasons the new age movements are so popular is that they play on this desire by declaring us to be gods. It s music to our ears, even if it s not true. But it lets us think that it is all about us. 12 Literally: We are to be human and not God. This is the sum; it will not This sentence is written in German. Luther s Works, 49:337; Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Briefwechsel, (Weimar: Herman Böhlaus, ), 5, (June 30, 1530). Hereafter referred to as WABr. 13 Large Catechism, I.2,3, in Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., The Book of Concord : The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000). -4-

5 2). We are Justified by God s Grace Alone through Faith Alone Once we realize that we want to play god, we can understand what Luther meant by the great reformation teaching that we are put into a right relationship with God by God s grace alone through faith alone. We are not gods. We cannot save either ourselves or our world from death. Nor can we, by our own effort or understanding, break out of that habit of wanting the world to revolve around us. Only God can do what is required. Only God can give us life and salvation and turn us from being curved in on ourselves to being opened out to the world. How does God do that? God gives life and salvation by declaring us forgiven even before we make a bunch of promises that we can t keep and by creating in us a trust in God for our life, rather than ourselves. God does everything needed so that our lives revolve around God, the author of life and salvation. 3). People are, at the Same Time, Completely Sinners and Completely Justified We live in a world that thinks everything should happen right away. We are not a patient people. We also think that way in terms of life and salvation. We are often impressed with born again experiences, especially when a person is changed from a scoundrel to a model citizen overnight. And we expect, in a sense, that the same should happen to us. Once we are baptized, once we are forgiven, we expect and assume that we can now be perfect. After all, our sins are forgiven. We are on the glory road. But God doesn t always operate that way. While it is true that in a splash of water, the Word spoken, and bread and wine swallowed, God does forgive sins, that doesn t mean we are completely transformed into perfection all at once. Rather, we are a long-term recovery project for God. Our foremost sin, of trying to be gods in God s place, is still operative. It won t be destroyed until we die. We can t give up on our dream of being the king of the castle in some form or another. That is why baptism involves daily renewal. The it s all about me self needs to be drowned daily. It is sort of like chocolate to me. I have a weakness for chocolate. Wave a piece of chocolate in front of my nose, and that is all I will be able to think about. And even if I eat some, then I ll still be wanting more. That is how this original, or first sin operates in us. And I know that it is only when I am dead will I no longer be tempted by chocolate. Once I m dead, you can wave chocolate in front of me all you want, and it won t tempt me in the least. So until we are dead and buried, we will be sinners, operating from a sinner s perspective. We are not on our way to becoming holy. We are not almost perfect. Instead, this Lutheran way of thinking reminds us that we are sinners. And we shouldn t be surprised that those who call themselves Christian, are still sinners. We will continue to act from selfish motives, no matter how disciplined. So we shouldn t be surprised that Christians sin! What we should be surprised about is that God still wants to forgive us! That is what happens, as God acts, even while we are still sinners, to declare us justified, made right with God. In God s eyes, we are now in Christ. We are forgiven. Not because of what we have done, but because what Christ has done. -5-

6 I believe that this fundamental Lutheran understanding of being, at the same time, both a total sinner and totally in a right relationship with God, has been forgotten in our world. Partly, it is because we no longer see ourselves as sinners opposed to God. At the most, we treat sin as a minor flaw, a matter of morality, or of no consequence, which can be addressed with a quick fix or a slight attitude adjustment. And when that is the case, we don t really need Christ to save us. We can do it ourselves. We have the technology, or so we think. If it were only that simple! 4). Justified by God, We are Set Free to Move Out of the Church and into The World. One of the incredible things about our Lutheran tradition is that because our salvation revolves around what God does for us rather than what we do for God, we have an amazing freedom to engage our world even as justified sinners. Since we can t suck up to God, we can re-direct our energies, as individuals and as a church, toward our neighbours and our society. Instead of being curved in on ourselves navel gazers, where it s all about me, we are curved outward by God to be all about others. Believe it or not, our Lutheran theology calls us to be shakers and movers for justice in our society! Luther could not talk about being justified for very long without talking about how free we are to be engaged in justice for others. We are liberated to serve. 5). The Unity of the Church is Based on what God Does Lutherans have always believed that what makes a person Christian is what God does. And that means that church membership is not based on what we do. Our wonderful behaviour is not what makes us Christians or good members of the church. Instead, we are in Christ because of what God in Christ has done for us through the calling of the Holy Spirit in the waters of baptism. We are brought into a relationship with God through Christ, because God gives us the ability to trust God s promises for us. As Luther echoed in the explanation of the third article of the Creed in the Small Catechism, I believe that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ my LORD or come to him, but instead the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, made me holy and kept me in the true faith, just as he calls, gathers, enlightens, and makes holy the whole Christian church 14 on earth and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one common, true faith. Daily in this Christian church the Holy Spirit abundantly forgives all sins mine and those of all believers. On the Last Day the Holy Spirit will raise me and all the dead and will give to me and all believers in Christ eternal life. This is most certainly true. 15 The Lutheran reformers also pointed to the two things that are essential for the unity of the church. Not surprisingly, both things are activities of God through which God creates life and salvation, through the Word preached and taught, and in the Word proclaimed in the Sacraments. As Melanchthon wrote, 14 As the editors note, Christenheit. German versions of the Creed predating Luther often use this word to translate ecclesia (church). Small Catechism, II.3. note Small Catechism II

7 For this is enough for the true unity of the Christian church that there the gospel is preached harmoniously 16 according to a pure understanding and the sacraments are administered in conformity with the divine Word. It is not necessary for the true unity of the Christian church that uniform ceremonies, instituted by human beings, be observed everywhere. As Paul says in Ephesians 4[:4 5]: There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism. 17 It is easy to forget that the church does not depend on us and our actions or even piety, in order to survive. With the current fears of the demise of the ELCIC, it is tempting to add some human criteria to what the church needs in order to survive. We may decide that we need new structures, or institutional arrangements. We may be convinced that we need more lively music or new liturgy or even no liturgy at all. But the Lutheran Confessors point us back to what brings the church together and what is needed to keep it together; the Gospel proclaimed in Word and sacraments. That is, plain and simple, also what should be central for the spiritual and theological renewal of the church today: proclaiming the Gospel. How can we do that most effectively should dictate our structures and how we operate. IV. CONCLUSION I would suggest that these points that I have mentioned are really at the heart of what it means to be Lutheran. They are what makes us unique and most attractive to a multicultural world disillusioned with religious systems of all kinds. There are more things that could be mentioned, such as our identity as theologians of the cross, as Luther defined it. But these other things simply flow out of these five points already noted. In fact, one could summarize these five points by saying that at the core of Lutheranism is that the Gospel be harmoniously according to a pure understanding and the sacraments are administered in conformity with the divine Word. This happens when the focus is on God, the centre of life, as God proclaims and makes sinners right with God and through the spirit unites us to the Church, which is Christ s own body, and in turn, drives us into the world to serve. You see, Lutheranism, at its core, is not about an institutional organization or hierarchy. That is not what defines us. If Lutheranism is, simply about a particular institution, then being Lutheran would not matter at all. Christ did not die for us so we could simply form an institution. What defines us as Lutherans is our insistence on, and dogged commitment to, the proclamation of the Gospel through Word and Sacrament. That is our main attraction for others, and dare I say it, our only real attraction to our hurting, curved inward world. So, in summary, the Lutheran way of thinking and being is based on the central thought that The Earth is the Lord s. That means that our way of being is centered on God, 16 As the editors note, Einträchtiglich. In the Augsburg Confession, I.1 is translated as with one accord. Augsburg Confession VII.2-3.note Augsburg Confession VII

8 and what God does, that our world will be upheld by God, and that rather than worrying about what we should be doing as religious people, we are free focus on curving ourselves outward for our neighbours. It s not about us. It s about God and it s about our neighbours and our world. Thanks be to God! -8-