Once the Church loses the capacity to speak with its own language, we lose our identity. Even if the world around us and many within the Church have chosen to abandon the language of Scripture, Council, Creed, and Confession, the Church must be very slow to adapt and adopt the vocabulary and language of those around us. Our whole nature is words -- we speak of the Word made flesh, of the written Word of God which is performative and efficacious, and of the visible Word that delivers what it signs but all of this is meaningless when we surrender our vocabulary to those who speak from outside the faith or against the faith.
I fear this is exactly what is happening in Rome as it prepares again to convene a synod on the family and to deal with such issues as the communion of the divorced and the GLBT questions. When Rome surrenders its vocabulary and begins to speak in the language of the world (social justice, fairness, sincerity, love, affection, etc.) the whole issue is lost in a maze of terms foreign to the Scriptures and to our own unique history as the Church. Lutherans are in the same predicament. When we begin speaking like evangelicals or when we abandon the unique vocabulary and language we learned from the Scriptures and honed through years of council, creed, and confession, we have surrendered the argument and the authority to those who begin at another point.
No one is saying that in speaking the Gospel in conversation with those not yet of the Kingdom that we must be constrained to use only Biblical language and only creedal or confessional vocabulary. However, when we bring them into the Church we must teach them the language of Scripture and creed and confession. For part of catechesis is helping them to recognize and speak with the same vocabulary as Scripture and tradition. When we speak to the world addressing the world with the in apologetic task, giving our defense of the truth, we should endeavor to speak consistently and constructively using the Biblical framework of terms. For the very essence of our witness is that the Kingdom of God is in but not of the world, even as its citizens are.
I worry that we are becoming strangers to the Biblical framework and terminology, becoming orphans from the very theological and creedal tradition that unites us to those who have gone before, and becoming strangers to our own confessional identity. Once the Church loses the capacity to speak with its own language, she loses her very identity. We have a rich Biblical, liturgical, creedal, and confessional heritage and history. These are not peripheral to our identity but flow from it. To willingly choose to surrender our language, vocabulary, and identity is to surrender who we are as God has made us and called us to be distinctive as His own, living under Him in His kingdom, now and forever.
"When Rome surrenders its vocabulary and begins to speak in the language of the world (social justice, fairness, sincerity, love, affection, etc.) the whole issue is lost in a maze of terms foreign to the Scriptures and to our own unique history as the Church."
ReplyDeleteThat is what Luther and the Lutheran Confessions charged against the Romanists in the 16th century. Nothing appears to have changed on that side of the Tiber.
"Lutherans are in the same predicament. When we begin speaking like evangelicals or when we abandon the unique vocabulary and language we learned from the Scriptures and honed through years of council, creed, and confession, we have surrendered the argument and the authority to those who begin at another point."
The rest of the article repeats this theme numerous times. Are there any specific examples?
Certainly they should not include Rome's worldly and antiScriptural vocabulary and language denounced in the Lutheran Confessions, which would mean jumping from the Evangelical ditch on one side to the Romanist ditch on the other.
Quotation from Kenneth Korby:
ReplyDeleteWe have difficulty with language, furthermore, because the language we have inherited was different from the one we now use, and we have not spent that much time learning to know the language of the past before we discard it. Furthermore, our vocabulary regarding call, ordination, and the authority of the pastoral office in relationship to the royal priesthood of believers has become obscured and troubled. We are suffering confusion to a great extent because of the loss of our common spiritual and theological language. The language of pastoral theology and the care of souls is predominantly the language of the personality and social sciences. We are becoming poorer and poorer. Similarly, much of the language of piety has been taken over by the language of baptistified charismatics. The language of the catechism, of hymnody, of the liturgy, and of Bible translations is in such flux that fewer and fewer learn it by heart.
Kenneth F. Korby. “The Pastoral Office and the Priesthood of Believers” in Lord Jesus Christ, Will You Not Stay: Essays in Honor of Ronald Feuerhahn on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday. Edited by J. Bart Day, Jon D. Vieker et al. (Houston, Texas: The Feuerhahn Festschrift Committee, 2002); pp.333,334
To speak of the church is necessarily to speak of institution and organization. But makes a whale of a difference which images you are using when you say organization. If one speaks with the image of a religious IBM with its international headquarters, it is not far to consider of individual units as franchises to distribute whatever the central headquarters designs or sells. Such franchises are known as the grass roots. What a strange grid to lay over the holy church. Can you imagine what a picture is conjured up when nurturing the church is thought of as fertilizing the grass roots?
Korby, p.337 (Feuerhahn Festschrift)
"Furthermore, our vocabulary regarding call, ordination, and the authority of the pastoral office in relationship to the royal priesthood of believers has become obscured and troubled."
ReplyDeleteThe vocabulary of Walther's Thesis VI on the Ministry in Die Stimme unserer Kirche in der Frage von Kirche und Amt seems unobscured in either the original German or the various translations such as those of J.T. Mueller and M.C. Harrison:
"Das Predigtamt wird von Gott durche die Gemeinde, als Inhaberin aller Kirchengewalt oder der Schlüssel, und durch deren von Gott vorgeschriebenen Beruf übertragen. Ordination der Berufenen mit Handauflegung ist nicht göttlicher Einsegung, sondern eine apostolische kirchliche Ordnung, und nur eine öffentliche seierliche Bestätigung jenes Berufes."
Mueller: The ministry of the Word [Predigtamt] is conferred by God through the congregations as the possessor of all ecclesiastical power, or the power of the keys, by means of its call, which God Himself has prescribed. B. The ordination of the called [persons] with the laying on of hands is not a divine institution but merely an ecclesiastical rite [Ordnung] established by the apostles; it is no more than a solemn public confirmation of the call.
Harrison: The preaching office [Predigtamt] is conferred [übertragen] by God through the congregation [Gemeinden] as the possessor [Inhaberin] of all ecclesiastical authority [Kirchengewalt], or the power of the keys, by means of its call, which God Himself has prescribed. B. The ordination of those men called by the laying on of hands [Handauflegung] is not a divine institution, but rather an apostolic, ecclesiastical rite [Ordnung], and only a solemn public confirmation [Bestätigung] of that call.
Of course, the word, übertragen, occasionally gets stuck in some people's throats.
The vocabulary in J.T. Mueller's section on the Doctrine of the Public Ministry (pp. 563-584) or on the Doctrine of the Christian Church (pp. 541-562) in his Christian Dogmatics (1934), also is unobscured and nontroubling, as the subtitle for the book suggests: A Handbook of Doctrinal Theology for Pastors Teachers and Laymen.
Once again, user-friendliness backfires. Using modern Bible versions reading like the Enquirer doesn't help Mater Ecclesiae's cause, either.
ReplyDeleteI was working out of town last Sunday and looked for an LCMS congregation to attend. I found one with a website saying "we use the liturgy" and it hyperlinked litugical terms from the Synod website. When I got there it was a praise band and wall screens. I was quite upset.
ReplyDelete