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.

Second thoughts. . .

The media has not been kind to us in the LCMS.  I am not here speaking of its treatment of us as much as our treatment of it.  We have used the media in so many less than helpful ways and it has created a number of ill effects that do not bode well for the future.  Perhaps it is an appropriate moment to talk about it.

The media usage of the LCMS about the LCMS has been either to enlarge expectations and the reach of what Lutheranism can be and should be by extolling our good Confession OR it has been to diminish the reality of what Lutheranism is by exposing what is bad and making it known.  Some might see any difference.  I think there is a difference.

It is easy, after all, to expose what is bad or shameful among us.  We have no shortage of errors, scandals, and wrongs which rightfully shame us.  We are a church of sinners, after all.  One does not have to look very far to find good examples of such sin within the churches and clergy.  We are also well equipped to publish the record of our disappointments and embarrassments.  The subject of our outrage at those among us who live on the fringes of orthodoxy or morality or simple appropriateness is a fond one to take up and put pen to paper (or, in this case, words to a screen).  Some of it not only does not belong in public outrage but belongs in the more nuanced places where reason and due process live.  These things are not efficient but are slow and deliberate and prodding.  None of us is happy about this but it is probably better for all that the mechanisms of dealing formally with our discontent are not quick.  Part of that is because we seem to want to fix everything with bylaws and bylaws simply cannot fix much of what is wrong among us.  We crave decisive actors and actions except when someone is complaining about us.  I get it.

We are not so well equipped to utilize the resources of the internet for reasoned conversation or civil debate but even less so in praising what is good or convincing each other what is right and salutary.  There are some who do just that.  They are positive and build up more than they tear down.  From podcast to blog to talk show they lay before us in humble expectation the cause of Scripture, creed, confession, and truth.  I laud them for what they do and know that this is to good effect.  I cannot count how many have given my own congregation a try because they heard the Word proclaimed and of a church body in which this proclamation was normal and normative.  I only wish there were more who were intent upon using the various platforms available to convince rather then ratting out in public what they find wrong.  I may seem to do the same but it is not truly my intent to be a tell all site but rather to prod us even by our wrongs to do what is right.  I apologize when I do something else.

There is one thing the internet seems ill-quipped to do.  It is a terrible place for a real conversation, for the expression of nuance, for respect for process, and for the discipline that ought to be common but is about as uncommon as common sense.  The internet is good at putting us against each other and into camps of those who disagree and who refuse to be moved from where they stand.  There was a time when I regularly participated in a couple of such online forums but they ended up in stalemates over predictable arguments and it grew tiresome and tragic even to participate.  I am genuinely surprise when comments made on social media are not designed either to throw red meat to the hungry wolves or inflame the dragons among us.  It ought to be the other way around.  Moral outrage with its implicit self-righteousness should not be the norm but the exception.  Or at least I wish it were.

We are accountable to each other in this Synod and we are duty bound to observe the covenants of love that define our relationship but I am not at all sure it is good or helpful to turn us into spies who take to the web to tell all about the sins and failings of others.  I would not be ELCA if it were the final remnant of Lutheranism left but I really am saddened by what it has become.  It is a real tragedy and I cannot but grieve the loss of better predecessor bodies than what their merger became.  Likewise, I am saddened by what Anglicanism has become and what even the seven sisters of Protestantism became in view of what they were once.  I do not want a small but purer Missouri.  I want a growing Missouri which is growing because it is more and more faithful to Scripture, creed, and confession.  I do not want those whose potshots at our church body have sullied our reputation even more to shame us from being truthful and orthodox. Neither do I want us to become a caricature of our pompous selves as those outside us view the Synod and prove correct the stereotype of us as a people who love cutting down more than we can tolerate building up.  I hope the new year bring a little regret for how quick we are to shame each other in public as the first step we take when something is not as it should be.  I pray that in the New Year we will learn how to talk together in pursuit of the fuller orthodoxy and catholicity that is our prayer and not simply to boil things down to the minimum we can all agree upon.

Indeed, the whole point of moderated comments on this blog was to derail the side conversations that became nothing more than rude shouting matches.  This does not glorify God or extend the cause of Christ.  Yes, we must be blunt when wrongs are left without correction from those so charged with these duties yet we should not delight in being the first to publish how bad some of us are.  That is why I am hoping some of those who do that will take a pause from hitting the publish button.  We need have a higher purpose in all of this than delighting in the sins of others or we are Pharisees and Publicans all. 

An Unbroken History. . .

I read a while ago of a Lutheran's story of becoming Roman Catholic.  In it, she did not disparage her Lutheran past but found it lacking in many ways that Rome fulfilled.  Her story is not unlike many I know of people who love the doctrine of Lutheranism but who cannot seem to resist the mystique of Rome.  They sometimes bounce back and forth, yearning for a real sermon and catechetical teaching and finding it in the Church of the Augsburg Confession but then longing for a piety and devotional life (and ceremonial) that seems to be lacking in Wittenberg but is often overplayed in Rome.  They wear the scapular and medals and pray the discipline of the Rosary while their mind lives in the Lutheran Confessions and Luther's Catechism.  Some may find this odd.  I don't.  Some may complain about them and their seeming dissatisfaction but I don't.  Some may say they are not really Lutheran enough but I don't.  I am deeply sympathetic and find myself echoing some of their praises and laments of Lutheranism.

One such line that stuck out to me was that they were searching for a church with an unbroken history.  Rome seems the default in this.  After all, they have a line of popes and the choice real estate of the Vatican and all but this is where I think Lutherans fail.  We did not ever claim that the Church had ceased to exist in its Babylonian Captivity or in its exile from Scripture and the clear preaching of the Gospel.  Not at all.  But neither did we ever claim that we were a new church with new doctrine, new ceremonies, and a new ministry.  In fact, the claim of the Augustana that is the most bold is the very one we seem to shy away from today.  That claim is that we have not only NOT departed from catholic doctrine and practice but insist that we will change if it can be shown that we have.  This is the implicit claim not to be a catholic communion along side others but to be that catholic and apostolic Church that has such an unbroken history of faith, doctrine, teaching, exegesis, sacraments, piety, and worship.  If there is a distinct and uniform failing among all Lutherans today, it is our retreat from that claim and that identity.

Lutherans of all stripes seem to have accepted that they are a church with a date of founding that came fifteen centuries after Christ.  On the left, they have embraced the lie of our false ecumenism in which no one has all the truth, the most profound truth is diversity, and the only real unity is unity in diversity.  So they are content to live as step-sisters in a house without a Father and in which Christ is not Savior nor even really Brother but merely example of embodied love.  They look at the Church as if she were a mismatched set of paraments and vestments, more reflecting preference and identities of the people than the Christ or the Church established by His death and resurrection.  They commune anyone and everyone without even expecting baptism much less any real common creed or confession.  Their understanding of Church is a fragile negotiated peace in which everyone keeps their own distinctives so long as they do not contradict one another.  Of course, their most sacred tenets of faith insist upon the full embrace of the various sexual desires and gender identities -- even more than the two natures of Christ!  They do not care who has the unbroken history because they are the church of now, of a Scripture and doctrine unfolded in the present and not rooted in the past -- much less the preserved deposit once delivered.

Lest the right get too smug, they are equally as wedded to a beginning rooted in the sixteenth century and to a slightly less modern version of truth.  They have made peace with the idea that somehow the Church was left by God to live in error for nearly 1500 years before somebody came along to get it right.  Even those who appreciate the saints who went before whose words and witness accords with the claims of the Reformers do not use that much more than a footnote to the real things that matter because they were said or written by Luther or the great teachers of Lutheran orthodoxy.  They want to know not what is catholic or apostolic but what is Lutheran.  So they disdain ordination, for example, as mere apostolic custom -- as if that meant nothing much at all.  They live with high words but a practical worship life and piety built upon adiaphora in which the things that cannot be commanded are therefore unimportant.  They are too quick to caution against any outward piety and dismiss it all as if it meant nothing in order to focus on the intricacies of lectionary debates or the use of non-Lutheran hymns or third use of the Law as if these were the mighty questions of the time (not that these are neither interesting nor useful discussions).   No, it seems to me that the real vexing question for Lutherans today is if we are who our Confessions claim or not.  Under worship wars and communion hospitality and catechesis and preaching, this is the most urgent and profound question.

I will say upfront that I have no interest in belonging to any Church which claims a founding date later than the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  I have no interest in departing from the unbroken history of such Church, her doctrine and her life.  I wish I could say that Rome was in better shape to claim this because it would be a simple matter of swimming the Tiber.  The reality is that Rome is has institutionalized the whole idea of invention whether by pope or council or bishop or the mere toleration of teaching and practice that contradicts historic claim.  It was, in Luther's idea, a church of novelty that was remarkably successful in making their novelties appear to be catholic -- from purgatory to a justification by grace through faith that still deposits meritorious work to the assent of the Christian to treasuries of merits (which surely would have been depleted by now!) to papal infallibility invented 23 years after the Missouri Synod organized to idiots appointed or tolerated as bishops but who obviously hate the faith and the people they serve.  Rome has the mystique but little more.  Its doctrine is an evolution of reason and human idea that has neither root in Scripture nor the catholic witness of the fathers.  Orthodoxy has much to its appeal but the reality is that its history ended nearly 1200 years ago and it seems content to live with the remnants of that past along with its many ethnic identities.  If Orthodoxy every got its act together, it could be more attractive but I am not Greek or Russian or Slavic and my mind and heart too Western to have anything more than a passing desire for the East.

The woman who let her Lutheranism for Rome seems happy but she lives with one of those idiot bishops who disdains history and tradition.  I could not.  But neither am I happy with any Lutheranism that refuses to live up to or abide by the claims of our Confessions.  For anyone with half a wit understands that the claims of those Confessions are to be that Church with an unbroken history.  Sadly, we no longer even really complain that Rome has co opted that.  Instead, too many of us sit idly by content to be Protestants with reason and culture to live above Scripture as long as it fits what we are thinking.  The reality is that to be that Church with an unbroken history is neither comfortable nor contentment.  It is the constant battle less against the agents outside than with the voice inside and the unending struggle to be faithful.  It is this I am looking for and I suspect I am not alone.  The miracle is that there are literally Lutherans in nearly every denomination -- they just don't know it.  They want what I want -- a Church informed and bounded by Scripture, living in unbroken history and continuity with her past, in the vibrant and profound moment of sacramental life gathered around the Word and Table of the Lord, with an external piety to set them apart and express what the mind knows and the heart believes, and sure that this is more important than any cause of relevance or success bestowed by the world.

The longing for home. . .

In what passes for art today, words on a canvas, plate, or mug often speaking in glowing terms of home and the yearning for order and place.  The so-called art remains popular even while it would seem that Americans have done nearly everything to distance their own lives from any sense of place, from the order of the past, and from an enduring home.  We are mobile and do not merely travel but move from place to place, house to house, and apartment to apartment.  We trade in jobs faster than we do vehicles.  We have invented desires and genders and mainstreamed them.  At the same time, we live more on screens and the reality of a digital world than the real world.  We love the idea of longevity but we ditch relationships and romances as fast as we replace our phones.  We are enamored of nostalgia and so the popularity of things like Downton Abbey but it is a conditional nostalgia -- conditioned upon including glimpses of the present in the mythology of our past and a non-judgmental view of our core values as a society.  

The longing for home will not be satisfied by technology or digital relations.  It is built in us by our Creator and yearns for the real reality of husband and wife, parent and child, extended family and abiding friendships.  It does not imagine home but builds it whether in house or apartment, establishing the blessing of place alongside the blessing of purpose.  The gift of Christianity is not simply the salvation of the individual but the restoration of this blessing in the shape of vocation.  The problem of the present is that we attempt to embrace the imagery without adopting the theology of creation, the order and purpose of our lives, and its shape in marriage, family, and home.  Art can express many things but the artsy words of pop art fail to deliver to us the things of which they speak.

My grandparents and parents never left home.  They flourished where they were planted.  They lived not for the pursuit of financial gain or the realization of great dreams but they sought to be stable financially in order to take care of those within their duty and to live as a contributing member of the community of church and community.  At my parents funerals, and those of my grandparents, family gathered from all kinds of places to join with the lifetime friends in the community to remember and give thanks that these were part of their home and their lives.  In that moment I longed to be part of them but part of me felt much like an outsider.  I had left home for college and then to seminary and the wisdom of the Church and the work of the Spirit planted me first on Long Island and then upstate New York and finally Tennessee --  a world away from the small town in which I was nourished.  Though I imagined myself one with them, my brother was more than me.  I made my home where I was and did not join my labors and love to the place where I had been born.

The playing of sexual desire and gender as if they were toys and the disconnect between our lives and their purpose and shape with the purpose and shape of those who went before us have left us confused and confounded as a people.  We long for the very thing we have rejected.  We want to be given order in the hope of receiving from it purpose and identity but when confronted with that order we reject it -- forgetting its cost in fueling our longing while keeping us from see that yearning fulfilled.  Retreating to our screens and the imaginary places we might belong, we keep alive the yearning while distancing ourselves even more from its fulfillment.  It is no wonder that depression is rampant among us nor should it surprise us that our melancholy estate finds its ultimate conclusion in the decision to end our lives when we so decide to end them.  The answer does not lie with the digital but with the real, with the surrender of our wills to the Divine Will expressed in the shape of creation, the blessing of redemption, and the purpose of life to glorify God above all things.

When the Church is silent on this part of our life -- the ordered life shaped by God's purpose and will -- we are depriving the people of God of the comfort of knowing their place within God's creation, their purpose grander than self-fulfillment, pleasure, entertainment, or happiness, and their supreme identity as a child of God.  When we go to Church, we find ourselves met by the waiting Father who welcomes us home and to an end for the longing and yearning that threatens to consume us.

The quest for emotional support. . .

How curious it is that reports are now telling us how AI (artificial intelligence) is being used as well as how it is trusted by those who use it.  There was a time when AI was being heralded as an advance in the minutiae of technology, science, law, etc., which employed terminology and patterns of thought not normally used in every day conversation.  It was a means of freeing the people from servitude and pawning off unpleasant or boring things to AI.  Then it became a means of souring the breadth of information available and distilling it into short and easy to understand answers about questions -- what is happening across the world and why things happen as they do.  Very quickly, however, AI has shifted to another area.  It is now seen by many as a means of emotional support -- a therapeutic role.

A study from the Collective Intelligence Project on Human-AI relationships surveyed a small but significant number of people from some 70 or more nations and concluded that "AI moved from task tool to emotional infrastructure.”  What people are outsourcing is not the mundane, boring, or tedious tasks of work or life but friendships and emotional support.  In fact, the survey found that folks tend to trust AI in this role (as with others) even more than they trust other people or the institutions of society and culture.  In their quest to find support for or help in personal issues and emotional needs, they increasingly and very quickly turned to AI.

There was a time in which churches provided the means to and access into community where personal relationships were formed and flourished and emotional needs could be met.  Could it be that the churches have lost this role precisely because they have adapted to and been replaced by the same cold and impersonal digital reality of the rest of the world?  Watching worship is clearly not the same as in person participation in worship services.  Watching preaching and teaching on a screen are not the same as sitting in the pews with others and listening to a preacher or teacher.  Hearing music through speakers is not the same as lending your voice to the congregation's song.  Praying along with a voice on a screen or in your earbuds is not the same as praying with one voice as a congregation (just try praying a common prayer out loud in a zoom meeting).  Receiving a spiritual communion while watching the altar and the pastor distribute the gifts of God to the people of God is not the same as kneeling, eating, and drinking those gifts in the Holy Eucharist.  Yet too many churches and pastors rely on these in place of the common assembly of God's baptized people around His Word and Table.  In this, the churches have shown themselves to be the same as and not distinct from the ways things work in the world.

People once valued hearing even the hard things they did not wish to hear but needed to hear.  In those days preaching did not tiptoe lightly over people's views but confronted them with His Word and truth.  The side reality of our digital world is that we are less likely to hear things we do not agree with or the unpleasant truth that can compel repentance and we tend to look for places to be affirmed in what we already believe and to be encouraged in what we already think.  AI is very good at sensing both what we believe and think and then addressing us passively without rocking the boat of our sacred thoughts or feelings.  Furthermore, AI finds it hard to speak in the unequivocal truth of God's Word but very easy to appeal to feelings and to address the emotional wants or needs we place above our want or need for objective truth.  AI takes enough of what we give to figure out what we want to hear.  It is no wonder that AI has become an essential tool in the desire for emotional support in many.  The question ought to be at what cost?

Our critique of AI needs to focus clearly on the cost of hearing our own thoughts or beliefs amplified in the echo chamber of AI and internet communities and resources that supply us more with what we want to hear than what we need to hear.  Indeed, there are some who have found that over the long term, AI does not deliver.  Look at the beginnings of a revolution among the young who have been coddled with the soft and easy life of living within the comfort of their own thoughts or opinions but who now are seeking out those churches which will call them to repentance, connect them with the transcendent, and compel them to change their sacred feelings and exchange their easy sins for a nobler life worthy of the higher power of God.  It may not quite be orthodoxy yet but it is headed in that direction.  A resurgence of orthodoxy means distinguishing the real Church from the fake ones whose soft seats and easy gospel has little to do with sin, death, a Savior who is God in flesh, and a life stronger than death.  I am not saying we should be blind to the emotional quests of those around us but we cannot deliver to them anything less than the real Gospel of Christ crucified and risen and of the new life in us arising from baptismal water.  The real emotional support for which we long is answered not by finding a safe place insulated against all the things we do not like or want but in the power of forgiveness, the robe of Christ's righteousness, and the work of the Spirit to bring this to bear in us through lives worthy of our calling as the people of God.  The emotional support AI can bring is a feel good moment that will end up leaving us mortally wounded.