How odd it is that we can so easily dismiss the sacrament of ordination as mere apostolic custom! How strange it is that we can replace confidence in God's Word with confidence in the scientific postulations of man! How weird that we marvel at the miracles of our own technology while at the same time trying to look for a way to bring the miracles of God in the Old Testament and His miracles in Christ down to something explainable! How foolish we are to reject what every Christian teacher believed right down through the ages including Luther and Calvin and those who followed them at least until the early 1800s! Is it really that we know better or we just think that given the state of culture, life, and the norms of ordinary belief we can no more hold the things once believed as tenable?
The problem with Christianity today is not that we believe too much but too little. We are even out of step with the Reformers and nearly every Christian teaching from the time of the apostles until the last couple of centuries and it does not bother us. In fact, we seem to take great comfort with the fact that we are so smart, so well educated, and so proficient with science and technology that we tell people all the time that no one believes this stuff anymore. The problem is this. It does have consequences. It renders our confession of the creeds of Christendom suspect and empty. It means that we know better than Jesus who spoke of Adam as a real person and Moses and the parting of the Red Sea as real truth -- something we seem to enjoy insisting even though it places us over the Son of the Most High. It means that we are more thoroughly conversant with the cultural and societal beliefs today than we are the Biblical context or consistent confession. It also means that we are more distant from our forefathers in the faith than we should be and do not seem to find it the least bit disconcerting that they and their words have become more history that creed or confession fit for the present day.
Some think that we are foolish to argue over such things as the historicity of Adam and Eve or the saving events of the Old Testament or the miracles of Jesus or the ever-virginity of Blessed Mary. If that was all we are debating then perhaps the charge might be apropos but it does not take much digging to discover that what we are really talking about is whether or not we put our reason over God's Word and our understanding over the faithful who went before us. When you put it like that, it is not arguing over minutiae but over the truthfulness and reliability of the Scriptures and their teachers down through the ages. Put it that way and I would rather fall on the side of the faithful who went before me and look foolish in the eyes of some today than to wise in the moment and foolish before the God who is yesterday, today, and forever the same.
2 comments:
"Some think that we are foolish to argue over such things as... the ever-virginity of Blessed Mary."
That "Some" would include Lutheran theologians as far back as the 17th century. In his 1867 essay, "Die EvangelischLutherische Kirche die wahre sichtbare Kirche Gottes auf Erden" (p. 126), which was delivered to the Convention of the General Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and other States, October 31, 1866, C.F.W. Walther quotes Johann Conrad Dannhauer (1603-1666) from his 1649 book, Odosophia christiana seu Theologia positiva}} (\i{Christian philosophy or positive theology, Sect.11, p. 66 (as translated by John Theodore Mueller in The True Visible Church, C.F.W. Walther, CPH, St. Louis, 1961, p. 107):
"An article of faith is not a gloss, assertion, or opinion for which there is no clear and definite passage in Holy Scripture. Such, for example, are the questions concerning the time of the world’s creation, whether it took place in spring or in fall; the day and year of Christ’s birth; the perpetual virginity of the blessed Virgin after His birth; the soul sleep, and other matters in which men might exercise their wits. But these dare not be forced upon others as sacred teachings of the church. Such excrescences occur in scholastic theology by the wholesale, where one tries to milk a he-goat, while another endeavors to catch the milk in a sieve."
In his Vorträge über die Evangelisch Lutherische Kirche, die Wahre Sichtbare Kirche Gottes auf Erden (Lectures on the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the True Visible Church of God on Earth, Seminary Press, 1916, pp. 116-7), Franz Pieper also included the 1649 quote from Dannhauer and then made the following (translated from German) comment:
"Furthermore, it is an article of faith that Mary was a virgin before the birth and at the birth of Christ, that is, that Mary gave birth as a virgin. This is stated in the Holy Scriptures: Isaiah 7:14; Matthew 1:23-25. But the question of whether Mary remained a virgin until her death (the semper virgo) is not answered so clearly in the Scriptures that anyone who answers the question in the negative would have to be considered a heretic."
"How odd it is that we can so easily dismiss the sacrament of ordination as mere apostolic custom!"
It depends on what definition of sacrament is used, and distinguishing a sacrament from a solemn public confirmation of the Divine Call. Furthermore, in his Kirche und Amt (Church and MInistry) C.F.W. Walther explains under Thesis VI on the Ministry: "Whatever cannot be proved to be God's institution from His Word cannot be regarded and accepted as His own institution without committing idolatry. Scripture does not tell us of any divine institution of ordination." Walther supports his thesis with excerpts from the Lutheran Confessions, Martin Luther, and seven other Lutheran theologians. This understanding of ordination has also been accepted as correct by the Missouri Synod for over 170 years.
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