Time. . . who needs it?

When God ordered creation with the gift of time, it was not like the time we measure today.  Sunrise and sunset defined everything.  It was simply about light and dark and not about seconds and minutes and hours.  Nobody cared about them because no one needed them.  Morning began with sunrise and the day ended when evening saw the sunset. Apart from that, we simply worked.  We defined the hours of daylight by what we did.  Some of it was for self and family in the ordinary chores of house and home and some of it was for others as well in fields and cattle.  Time was largely observed by when work began and when it ended.  There was no time-clock to punch, as it were; when it was light work began and when it became too dark to work, it stopped.  So did we.  The dark was rest.

Now the seconds and minutes and hours dominate us.  We are over scheduled and under rested because the light no longer matters.  We light the dark and dark the light but the ubiquitous screens live on in both and so we find it hard to rest our minds and our fingers.  The busyness continues whether for work or pleasure or aimless distraction.  There are fewer boundaries with the clocks ticking away and the phones reminding us about this or that.  The world has become one great alarm clock with its local version the most important use of that technological marvel, the smart phone.  It is smart but we are not.  We have surrendered nearly everything to clocks that rule our lives and to the time we measure in the smallest of increments.  Gone is the ordinary rhythm of light and dark, work and rest.  In its place is a constant on in which sleep is interrupted with tones that signal notifications of this or that or texts we absolutely must see.  Nothing waits and we wait for nothing.  We simply have to be plugged in.

It is kind of interesting to remember that the church bell that sounded the hours when no one had watches and none had even imagined a cell phone.  The church bell was not interested in making sure you were heading to your appointments but it was sounding out the hours of prayer -- less for the folks in the fields or markets or homes than for the monastics who were drawn together for prayer by those tolls.  The very word for "clock," I am told, has it’s origin is from a word meaning a “bell.” And so the bell sounded into the ordinary noise of the day to announce the times for prayer the monks and nuns would keep. Few needed or wanted to know the hours except those who prayed them.  Then it changed.  The church gave us the clock and we took it from the church until the bells no longer chime and if they do it is not to call us to prayer but to urge us on to the next task.

By my modest search, mechanical clocks powered by weights and gears first began to appear in the 13th and 14th centuries.  In cathedral towers, monasteries, and town squares these clocks were powered bells and some fancy enough to provide dancing mannequins decorated in local color. They were “clocks” because they were powered bells -- not so much telling time as announcing it.  The liturgical year was the accompanying calendar to these bells.  Both are pretty much lost to us and with them any sense of time as God's creation and domain.  It is about us though I wish it could be said that time improved in the bargain.  It did not.  It became more bane than blessing and has held us captive since the sun dial made telling time portable.  Oddly enough, one of the quirks of retirement is that I no longer wear a watch.  Indeed, I am forever forgetting what time it is because my appointments are few, my schedules are more open, and none of it is as urgent as it once was anyway.  In the beginning I thought this a problem.  Now I wonder if it is less problem than a return to a simpler age when everyone was like me.  Morning matters and evening but the day is less cluttered and the night left free for rest.

People are incredibly adaptable to change -- look at how we complain but then figure out how to live with the foolishness of daylight savings time!  There is a limit, however.  When time is not simply a day ordered by light and dark, it often becomes a prison of deadlines and demands.  Our bodies and our minds were created for a rhythm and the church once announced it with the call to prayer.  Now we can stay up late and rob ourselves of rest and confuse the pressing need for work with the ability to explore the internet and its games and useless knowledge without boundaries.  It is no wonder that vices exploit time and our ordering of time apart from God exposes us to their influence and temptation.  If there is a thing we ought to do it is to recover the sense of time ordered by light and darkness, day and night.  While that might mean giving up some of our precious screen time, it will surely reward us with more than rest and some real peace.  News was once a scheduled event but not it breaks in to unsettle us with what is local and what is too far away to imagine.  Has it helped us?  Has it contributed to the lesser evils of crime and violence?  I think you know the answer.  I also think you know why I long again for a time when the clock was the church's and the bell was our reminder of those who prayed as we should.  Here are some older words to a very familiar hymn:

1. Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home:

2. Under the shadow of your throne
Your saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is your arm alone,
And our defense is sure.

3. Before the hills in order stood
Or Earth received her frame,
From everlasting you are God,
To endless years the same.

4. A thousand ages in your sight
Are like an evening gone,
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.

5. Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the op’ning day.

6. Like flow’ry fields the nations stand,
Pleased with the morning light;
The flow’rs beneath the mower’s hand
Lie with’ring ere ’tis night.

7. Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Be thou our guard while troubles last
And our eternal home.

 

Cultus vs ethical path vs cerebral belief. . .

The fact that we do not have definitive records from early Christianity does not seem to prevent those who want to draw conclusions from drawing the conclusions they favor.  I am thinking here of the myth of the simple faith of Jesus.  How many have been tempted to minimize both doctrinal truth and institutional worship as a late and unwelcome invention?  You do not need to be Roman or even among the seven sisters of Evangelical Christianity to hold to your sacred truth over fact.  Lutherans do it as well.  Most are drawn to the mythology of an early and pristine Christianity uncluttered by doctrine, liturgical form and test, and a sacramental understanding of things.  Instead they combine to preserve the falsehood that early Christians would be scandalized by what institutional Christianity has become and fear the devil won after all.  They would insist that the recovery of a simple, easy, non-cultic form of Christianity is the cause which will save us and that anything else is an imposition upon the first Christians and a distortion of any kind of church they would have known.

They have sold to us the lie that early Christians worshiped in their living rooms in a first century version of a Barcalounger while being engaged either by a cerebral version of the faith or exhorted to a certain moral shape of everyday life.  They have come to the conclusion that there were no altars in early Christianity but only tables -- the same ones that held lunch and afternoon tea -- and that any development of a religion of doctrinal tenets, liturgical worship, vestments, chant, and altars was a deformation rather than a formative maturation.  So their goal has been as much as possible to disdain the present in favor of such a pristine Christianity of potlucks, universalism, and love for everyone.  Their vision has exchanged the vertical for the horizontal and encouraged us to a noble simplicity over the excesses of later eras.

Are they correct?  It would seem that some on both sides of the theological spectrum want to agree with their history of it all.  The evangelicals were sure all along that nothing mattered except people being happy though they differed on how to make them happy (rigorous moral living or consent to the right set of doctrinal propositions.  Bronze age Lutherans somewhat embarrassed by their own liturgy and vestments seem as likely to concede that what God wants is right believing and that nothing else matters all that much (from sacraments to good works!).  Preaching, believing, and right acting are all that really matter and the rest is, well, adiaphora (falsely meaning nothing all that important).  They marvel at how the Church devolved into a cultic religion.  I do just the opposite.  I am amazed at how quickly Christians were able to leave behind their forced gatherings in homes for proper church buildings and all the accoutrements of worship.  Constantine must have been a very powerful man to be blamed for everything from invoking what is Scripture and what is not to the corruption of a simple faith into a complex one of creeds and truth statements.

The problem we have today is that some insist upon framing their lives as Christians and their association with the Church in the realm of volunteers who share a set of words on paper and who live the Amish paradise of a most unceremonial pattern of worship.  However, worship is not some little sideline for some in the faith but the place where we are nearest to God and actually receive His grace through means and glimpse the promise of the eternal to come.  Doctrine does not live in the realm of reasoned proposition or theoretical faith held mostly by the mind but is how we live out our faith together. Doctrine touches every aspect of Christian life.  That is the genius of lex orandi lex credendi.  The phrase gets this correlation between doctrinal integrity and liturgical unity, between conceptualizing God and meeting Him where He is to be found (means of grace).

Luther, the modern Roman Liturgical Movement, moralistic and therapeutic deism, and the goal of a noble simplicity all got it wrong if they insisted that heart and mind were where it happened over Word and Sacrament.  BoGiertz got it correct.  Mission and worship do not compete but are different sizes of the same coin.  Let's just be radical here.  If you think Jesus would be shocked and offended by vestments, pipe organs, choirs, chant, altar parments, crucifixes, bowing, kneeling, and the like, then you know a different Jesus than does the Scripture and the blessed who hear and believe.  You cannot read the passages on worship in the Old Testament and then jump to St. John the Divine's vision of Revelation and presume that in between God just wants us to gather around the kitchen table and much upon some symbolic food along with supper, think about Jesus and how we can follow Him, and keep the doctrine stupidly simple.  I am tired of those who have made Mid-Century Modern into a religious architectural style and entertainment into worship but I am also weary of having to defend to those who want it all but less of it that Christianity is cultus and not simply ethical path, that this faith is about a real taste and vision of eternity and not simply how to have your best life now.  We have surely screwed up a few things over time but recognizing the liturgical shape of worship and the Christian life is not one of them.  St. Matthew's Gospel begins and ends with Immanuel -- from the name given to the Child born of a Virgin to the promise of the Risen Savior.  This Immanuel takes shape, form, and flavor in the Holy Eucharist and within it unfolds the liturgical and ceremonial shape of how then we live.  Faith comes by hearing the Word but it does not live solely in the mind.  We behold Him not merely with the ear but with all the senses.

Not the gold standard. . .

When I was a teenager my father would sometimes complain of me that "I had a champagne taste on a beer budget..."  Surely I am not the only one who recalls that little phrase.  Its meaning is quite obvious.  You cannot afford what you want so you adjust your taste to what you can afford or need (vs want).  When you think about it, it is not bad advice.  In the purchase of cars, I routinely defer to what I need and can afford over what I desire.  In the purchase of clothing, I tend to the clearance rack.  If you cannot afford the best, you accept the best you can afford.  It works in so many things but it is a terrible way to look at the Church.

Of late, the discussion over residential seminary and the liturgy has used another phrase the gold standard.  While some may be old enough to recall when our nation was actually on the gold standard, its meaning as a shorthand phrase to describe that past is largely lost.  Instead, the gold standard has become, at least in common parlance, the champagne taste and it is countered by what is urgent or affordable in the present moment.  In both phrases, the idea is that no one disputes that the residential seminary is better or even best OR that the liturgy is better or even best.  The problem is that we cannot afford either one right now.  We are running a deficit of clergy, time is of the essence, pastors have families that need not be uprooted to go to seminary, online training has become normal, and local control and connection is preferred over a centralize control manifest in a seminary setting.  Yes, the complainers all agree that residential seminary is better but right now we need to adjust to a new norm.

In the same way, the liturgy is spoken of as the same kind of gold standard.  It would be great if we all had pipe organs and choirs and people who know the words and music of the liturgy and sang with gusto and it attracted those outside the Church but that is not the case now.  Even small parishes using the liturgy and hymnal insist they cannot afford the gold standard of organ (I should say organist) so they have to use something else - something that is affordable.  Large parishes insist that they cannot pack them in without a praise band and entertainment style worship and though they wish it were different it is not.  As per a previous column, the gold standard gets in the way of reaching people for Jesus.  I could go on and on but you get the point.

My perspective is quite different.  I do not think that residential seminary or the liturgy is the gold standard or the champagne we can no longer afford.  I think it is simply who we are as Lutherans.  We long ago and from the start lived within the realm of a residential seminary (Wittenberg), of academic curriculum and standards, and of an educated clergy.  We did so not to change what had been but as people adopting the status quo.  We did not invent the residential seminary but accepted what had been and used it ever since with a few minor variations.  This is neither something new or unique to us.  It is who we are and who the Church had been before us.  In the same way, the liturgy is not something we invented nor did we perfect it.  We adopted it and simply added a set is rubrics or directions for use with the existing missal (that is called the Formula Missae).  For that matter, we did not, at least in the beginning, even deviate from the Latin norm!  It was who we were and are (well, are to some of us).  The problem here is not looking at things beyond our reach or price range now.  No, indeed, the problem is that some of us are no longer want to be who we were.  

This has been framed wrongly.  I blame adiaphora and Lutheran refusal to make rules about such things (except bylaws which we love to use to try to solve doctrinal problems).  It is time to get over it.  We are not a group of autonomous and independent congregations who can do what they please with impunity.  We have agreed to be who we are.  The confessional standard is not simply for cerebral appreciation or theoretical unity.  It is how we live.  We hold these things not as ideals but as the norm and how we form pastors and do worship flows from this norm -- not from cultural situations or preferences but from what we believe, teach, and confess.  When we apply this gold standard or champagne idea to such things, we are in essence watering down our confession and admitting that we can operate outside that confession when the need demands.  

It is as if we are making what might be necessary in the emergency condition of the folks lost on a desert island to be the norm which establishes everything we do.  Of course we have and will always have emergencies but these do not define who we are or establish what faithful practice is.  They are always exceptions.  Sure, we can call anything and everything an emergency (like we did during Covid) and hasten the dilution of what we believe, teach, and confess into mere theory to be set aside whenever we think it has become a problem or we can admit that emergencies are rare and refuse to define the rule by these exceptions.  I would add beauty to the list along with residential seminary, the liturgy, hymn, chant, and song.  Beauty in the house of the Lord is not decoration but words, including the Divine Word, expressed in art, glass, carving, metalwork, and stone.  Warehouses suffice as an emergency substitute but once they become the norm, everything else becomes optional as well.  What is merely optional almost always becomes exceptional and not the norm at all.

Bottom line:  Residential seminaries and the liturgy are not gold standards or champagne tastes but merely the living out of who we say we are.  They are not set in stone but they change incrementally and not radically over time.  There is a hermeneutic of continuity going on here.  It is not fruit basket upset because the times are changing but the steady course of a ship which is aimed not at getting through this storm but arriving safely and faithfully at the home port.   

The start of it all. . .

Let me state for the record that I have no objection to scholars debating the authorship of Biblical books in which the author is not named within or attributed to someone in another Biblical book.  I suppose it is a n impossibility for the same to resist asking a similar question when the authorship is named or attributed.  It is, for my part, the least interesting of questions but, well, for those who live and breathe a mystery, have at it.  What I do object to is when the starting point of it the inquiry is to disregard or belittle what Scripture does say about authorship. 

If Scripture includes a reference to authorship or if the authorship has been attributed to someone in another Biblical book or if tradition has assigned authorship for good reason to someone, why must the debate begin by picking apart what Scripture says or using so-called science or archeology to insist why the Scriptures or tradition must be wrong.  What is there gained by immediately calling into question the veracity of Scripture or the primacy of tradition well established?  I can only presume that the whole enterprise is designed to raise questions about all of Scripture and not simply authorship.  Frankly, I have seldom been proven wrong in this assertion.

It is certainly one thing to begin with what Scripture clearly says about authorship or other things and to expound upon that using the clear passages of Scripture to illuminate the unclear.  It is quite another to use as your starting point that what Scripture clearly says must be wrong.  Yet that is how we got into trouble until now Scripture no longer has the confidence of many if not most commentators.  Indeed, I fear that the majority of those who encounter the Word of God begin with the presumption that it cannot be the Word of God but just might contain words of God.  Filled with the self-importance of that presumption, it goes one step further and insists that the job of the sophisticated scholar is to tell us which words belong to God and which do not. In this way, they save us poor foolish, superstitious, naive folks from being deluded by what the words actually say and mean.

Instead of paying attention to the remarkable consistency of teaching within the history of Christianity from the earliest days to the present, the scholar today uses every minor difference or fringe figure's dispute to say that there is no such thing as the catholic and apostolic faith at all -- at least nothing we can know for sure so far removed from the Biblical era.  Yet, the same scholars do not hesitate to presume upon Scripture what seems tenable, reasonable, logical, or acceptable in the present moment.  While this is not about same sex relationships, I will use this as an example.  The scholar begins by insisting that what is today (regularized same sex relationships in a nominally monogamous and legal setting) was never known in the Biblical era so therefore what the Scriptures say does not apply to such relationships.  In this way, it is impossible to argue against this.  It is implicit in the mind of the liberal or progressive that once you take what is condemned in Scripture (homosexual activity) and place it within the context of a relationship sanctioned by law and approved by the majority within a given culture, then Scripture has nothing to say about such homosexual behavior.  We could follow the same sort of logic about a thousand different things and end up the same place.  You cannot trust the Bible.

I once had a family interested in membership who insisted that they only believed the Bible and that creed or confession were not important.  So when I asked them if baptism saved or Christ's flesh and blood were really present in the Eucharist or that the pastor had the authority to forgive sins in Christ's name, they insisted the answer was "no."  If it says that, it cannot mean that and what it means must be different than what it says.  In response, I suggested to them that they had the marks of becoming a proud liberal.  They were deeply offended.  Why would I say that?  Because anytime you can begin to set aside what Scripture says because it offends your sensibilities or logic or conception of things, it is the start of questioning everything until little stands except the golden rule and a nice but irrelevant deity.

Over the years I have never met someone who took seriously what Scripture said until he began to believe nothing but I have met plenty of people who no longer took Scripture seriously and ended up believing nothing at all.  In other words, people who believed what Scripture said were less likely to abandon the Word of God but those who began to open the Bible with a question were highly likely to end up abandoning the Word of God.  The Bible cannot say that and if it does it cannot mean that -- this is a sure way to insist that Scripture must prove itself before they will believe any of it.  Sadly, this conversation too often starts with an assertion that we really do not know much at all about what Scripture says of itself and what we do know must be taken with a grain of salt.  

While we love to lump everyone into the fundamentalist camp if they pay attention to what Scripture says as the voice of God, the reality is that Lutherans do not fit the bill of a fundamentalist.  Indeed, the renewal of patrology or the commentary on Scripture as God's Word is a characteristically Lutheran contribution.  The idea that Scripture has some mystery to crack to behold some greater deeper truth (can anyone say Gnostic) seems to be a more Roman and progressive idea.  Rome says leave it to the pope or the bishops while the progressives insist we leave it to the experts.  In this way, despite what Benedict XVI warned of higher criticism, Rome seems captive to those who begin with skepticism while Lutherans begin with confidence.

The self-interpreting or transparent text . . .

Anyone who is Lutheran knows the word perspicuity.  Indeed, Lutherans have held to the clarity of Scripture, insisting that Scripture is clear, ever since Luther in On the Bondage of the Will.   It is one of those ideas that we know but are not at all sure what it means.  The contention of the Reformers’ Scripture is clear and its meaning self-evident or transparent is best seen as a claim against Rome's insistence that no one can read Scripture without the interpretive authority of the Church and its teaching magisterium to define what Scripture says.  For goodness' sake, this idea of the clarity of Scripture does not mean that Scripture is a simple or easy book to read.  In fact, everyone knows and believes that many things in Scripture are difficult to understand or else everyone would agree on what it says and means.  Our Lord Himself said that it is not given to everyone to understand the things of God, that the will of God is to reveal the truth to the small while hiding it from the great. While everyone knows that a knowledge of the original languages of Scripture is a help, the key does not come from knowing how to use the tools.  Scripture interprets Scripture works because the student of the Scriptures knows the book and approaches it by faith, knowing the Holy Spirit as guide.  But what this does not mean is that there is no need for the teaching authority of the Church.

Augustine famously said he would not have believed were it not for the authority of the Church.  He does not minimize the role of Scripture against the Church but understands the role of the Church to teach the Scriptures.  Protestantism has left us with a tyranny of individual interpreters who cannot be challenged, too many popes, if you will.  Sometimes Lutherans are tempted in that direction.  Just the Bible.  Even our own Confessions seem awkward to us.  What kind of authority do such creeds and confessions have?  Are we not Bible alone people?  It is as if this has influenced the idea that an educated clergy, especially one schooled in the Biblical languages and well taught in history and theology, is almost a problem rather than a blessing.  It just gets in the way, so to speak.  At least that is how some speak.  Online courses and a minimal sufficiency are not only all that is essential but all that needs be for the Church today.  In their push to let Scripture be alone, they have mistaken the idea that Lutherans do not believe that a churchly education is all that important against an urgent timeline and localization of belief and practice.  Is that who we are?  Does perspicuity or clarity mean that that the only skills or preparation the pastor brings to the table is administrative in nature or moral in shape?  Does this mean that all that talk of doctrine and faithful practice get in the way of a faithful clergy?  That is how it would seem if you listen to the current debate over online courses and non-synodical seminaries.  Give them the Bible and that is all that they need to serve the people today and the people in the pews know best what kind of pastor they want and need and how he should be trained. 

History says otherwise.  Henry Melchior Muhlenberg found doctrinal and liturgical chaos on the American frontier.  Not even a century later, CFW Walther complained that Lutherans in America did not know who they were, what they believed, or how they worshiped.  Even after the work of building seminaries and producing the Common Service, Graebner lamented the liturgical chaos in Lutheranism and suggested it was not simply about worship but also about what is believed.  The Church is not extraneous here but essential.  The teaching of the authority does not compete with Scripture but flows from Scripture as the Word is confessed and taught not as the opinion of one but as the catholic and apostolic faith, always and everyone believed and confessed.  Is our age now different?  Have we outgrown the need for the authority of the Church or a well trained clergy?  Our chaos today is in many respects the same as before.  We need the teaching authority of the Church not to replace Scripture but to unfold its truth against that which has been faithfully confessed and taught through the ages and we need an educated clergy who know the Word and who know both the challenges and the orthodox rudder that has maintained this truth through the stormy waters.

Luther was led to attack the Roman hermeneutic because it assumed an obscurity in Scripture which had to be penetrated by an allegorical or analogical interpretation by the magisterium of the external church.  At the same time Luther harshly attacked Rome for arrogating to itself alone the office of interpreting an obscure Scripture, he turns right about and attacks the radical reformers for indulging in private interpretation which ignores the general consensus of the church, the rules of good grammar, reason under the guidance of the Spirit, and the internal testimony of Scripture itself.  Either Scripture is clear or it is a dark book meant for the hallowed halls of the scholar but not for the ordinary Christian.  The clarity of Scripture must never be confused with simplicity or comprehensibility.  Luther would be most impatient with modern Lutherans who are preoccupied with a "simple" Gospel and who contend for a minimally trained clergy as a misuse of his words. For Luther the Gospel is the highest and most profound majesty. It is not simple. But it is clear and can be understood as to its meaning especially in matters of salvation.  What Scripture says is clear enough but what it means is the ministry of the Church and the clergy.  It means doctrine.  To fail to make the jump between what it says and what it means is the failure of Protestantism at the time of the Reformation and now in our world of vagaries and uncertainty.  We have the Word not to do with as we please but so that it might reveal to us the saving truth or doctrine by which we are saved and how we then live.  All dogmatics must be exegesis; and all exegesis must be systematic and dogmatic. In this way, our work, our confession, is exegesis. This is our confession of the clear Word of God."  What it means to be Lutheran is this disciplined approach to Scripture - both homiletically and
dogmatically.  This is why we have such high standards for an educated clergy and why we refuse to surrender the authority of the Church to the whim of the individual.