How fragile is Rome?

I read a while ago that there are some 55 permitted places where the Latin Mass is being celebrated.  Imagine that.  There are Roman Catholic dioceses that are routinely closing more parishes than that.  Yet the mere existence of 55 or so parishes where the Latin Mass is being celebrated is apparently so dangerous that it is something which must be regulated from Rome, allowed under the most rigid of rules, and segregated away from the ordinary population of Roman Catholics overall.  Wow.  That makes the Latin Mass a ticking time bomb bigger than nearly everything else which is happening in Rome today.  More urgent and of greater threat than synodality, rogue bishops being ordained, China administering a Roman Catholic province according to its rules, the fading number of nuns and monks, priests in costume, dance and pop music used for sacred purpose, the declining numbers of those who believe the Eucharist is actually the body and blood of Christ, the diminishing numbers of children for baptism or confirmation, the scandal of priestly sexual abuse, the declining numbers of priests overall, the routine nature of merged parishes and closed churches, etc...  I could have added so many things to that number.  I am sure you could have added to that list as well.  The point is that Rome is so fragile, the worst of the problems it is facing are 55 permitted places where the Latin Mass is celebrated and the request for more.

The Vatican granted permission to a very small number of parishes to celebrate the traditional Mass-- just 55 parish churches across 33 dioceses last year-- according to the exemptions permitted by the Dicastery for Divine Worship to the restrictions outlined by Traditionis Custodes.  Yet look at the news.  Some bishops are sure that the very essence of Rome is threatened by such permissions and have attempted to restrict them further than had been.  Pope Francis repudiated Pope Benedict for his generous permission and clamped down on it like the whole of Roman Catholicism was at stake.  It does not matter which side of this issue you are on, Rome is weak and fragile if this kind of thing has become an existential threat to the largest formal community of Christians throughout the world.  And we think we have problems in the LCMS.  At least we are talking about doctrinal issues and about those who wish to jettison the forms of liturgical worship which have become the formal face of our Confessions on Sunday morning.  Rome is so fragile that those who want to restore a form of the Mass effectively the exclusive form used for 400+ years are a threat to its very existence.  Wow.  And I thought we had problems. No wonder Pope Leo seems to have no clue what to do about this despite advice being offered from every side.  Apparently if he gets this wrong, Rome will collapse.

The new religious. . .

Reading an old self-defined style of spiritual without being religious, the author suggested he was a believer without faith—a religious atheist.  At the time I read this I dismissed it.  Thinking on it again, I am not sure it is far from the truth.  The truth is that it is hard to eradicate religion and it is inherent in the persona of humanity overall and each person in particular.  We invent gods when we reject the God and even when we refuse to grant classic definition to any particular deity, we insist upon having some sort of god and some sort of religion.  It seems impossible to escape from religion or some form of god.  So we are left with believers who have no faith and atheists who are also religious.

Believers without faith are those who acknowledge the need for some kind of deity and some sort of supernatural.  They love this spiritual side of humanity and they insist that simply because they have rejected God does not mean they have also rejected some sort of religion to fill in the cracks of modern day life.  Indeed, they find the spiritual intriguing and interesting even if they refuse to grant a God the honor of their faith.  They believe in many things, some of them contradictory, and so they cannot admit to an organized religion but they insist upon being acknowledged as honestly and with heartfelt feeling upon being religious.  They like the idea of Scripture but refuse to grant to Scripture its ultimate authority and claim as the Word of God that endures forever.  They seek a bendable word which can be formed to fit the moment and the need.  They like the idea of a holy book of wisdom but are not sure it has all that much to do with salvation.  Salvation is less the redemption of the sinner than it is an accommodation to sin, at least the favorite and culturally acceptable sins of the day along with the ultimate command and goal to be true to yourself, wherever that might lead.

They are atheists, to be sure, but they do admit that religion can be important.  Symbolism and all.  Emotion and feeling.  Ritual and ceremony.  They all beg for a place without the inconvenient baggage of dogma and a God.  They admit that civil religion once filled the gap even as they also posit the old civil religion as too narrow to fit the diverse character of modern society and different people.  Global causes have eclipsed individual redemption but the person still matters if only because religion is only one person wide and one person deep.  It is sort of the same kind of attraction some have for a monarchy.  It is a good show and fills the bill for national ceremony and pride but don't take it too seriously.  It is just for show.  In the end the monarchs are as impotent and confused as the deities ascribed to modern folks who don't want to believe but who don't want to abandon religion entirely.

Honestly, I get the attraction.  The Church has disappointed us too many times and the holiest of men have acted entirely unholy in ways that make it hard to take religion seriously enough to grant it any real faith.  Which pope was it who in conversation with someone seeking to sack Rome and destroy the Church admitted that the clergy and popes had been trying to do that from the inside for years and failed so what makes this fellow think he can do it now?  If only the Church were not filled with sinners I might find some consolation for my suffering soul.  But it is.  So faith is as much as I can give it and the only thing I can offer.  My eyes are constantly drawn to the good which falls short and the evil which cannot be overcome so if I am to believe in God, religion is not enough.  Faith is required and faith in a real God who cannot be reasoned out or His mystery explained away.  He must be take with the paradoxes that our minds struggle to swallow.  Simil justus is a fairly small one compared to the Three in One and One in Three.  

I fall asleep every night wishing I had something more than faith to hold onto and every night I admit to God that it is faith alone by which I come to Him or kneel before Him.  The cross assures me that I can hope for mercy but it insists upon the paradox of the innocent for the guilty, the God/man who cannot die to expire His breath and be carried to a grave.  In the end I do not believe in a God but in the God who face I see in Jesus even with all the uncertain and unreasonable baggage that comes with it.  I wish religious atheism were enough or religion without faith but it is even more disappointing than a God who cannot be controlled, a wild God who refuses to be tamed by man but binds Himself to the blood that cleanses us from all sin.  I end up sympathetic to those who are the new religious without having a real God but I must pity them rather than joining them.  The God whom creeds confess and whose voice speaks through Scripture is not simply what I must settle for but the only God worth believing in.  Perhaps the answer to Christianity is not trying to add a little belief into the religion of atheism but challenging the spiritual to give up the semblance for a messy reality made clean only by the splash of baptismal water and the gift of the Holy Spirit.  In the end it is only faith, the great dare to trust in what you cannot see or control but also cannot live without.

O Thou who changest not. . .

One of the modern fallacies and heresies is that the Church and Scripture and, well, God should change, evolve, mature, develop, and morph -- that this is the stuff of real life and if God is real, He and the things of God should also reflect what is a characteristic of man.  I do not need to rehearse the litany of voices all over the landscape of Christianity who believe that "change or die" is the most fundamental truth of the universe.  Perhaps Darwin and his ilk created the idea and the ideal of evolution but we have turned that into the most universal truth of our age -- a truth so common that about the only thing modern conservatives and liberals disagree over is the extent and pace of change.  Change is the sacred reality that under girds nearly all of modern life. 

The problem is that change is a primal characteristic of creation -- not of the Creator.  We are captive to a changing world and we change because time cannot be paused or stopped by anyone or anything within the sphere of the creative world.  This does not quite bode the same for Jesus who is the eternal Son of the Father who once in time was incarnate, born, lived, died, and rose again.  But for the rest of us, this is who we are.  It is not who God is.

To make God captive to change or to impose upon Him the demand that He and all His being evolve is to make Him cease to be God and turn Him into a creature like you and me.  We have a beginning and an end while God is.  He just is.  He is forever.  Jesus is the alpha and omega not in some symbolic sense but in the most real sense of all.  A God who changes is not worth having at all.  A God who must evolve is the mere elevation of a creative to a higher claim of status and ends up being no God at all.  

The modern quest for God is not a real pursuit of the eternal but the imposition upon God and His being all the limitations and foibles of our own temporary reality.  We are not in search of God as much as we are on a sacred journey to dethrone God and make Him no more than us and we no less than Him.  This God changes His mind and its fickle.  The God has no eternal truth but only His truth for the moment and ends up having to reinvent Himself just as we seem bound to do minute by minute of our lives.  This God has no Word that endures forever but a voice captive to a situation and to a snapshot in time.  The facts and history associated with His revelation and disclosure are quaint but nothing more.  They are left with only the relevance we assign and the meaning we define and the value we bestow.  Who needs or wants such a worthless God?  It is the curious pursuit of a God who simply cannot be real or at least any more real than we, our thoughts, opinions, and desires, are real. 

This is the Roman problem.  If the East stops everything at one point in time, say the last of the seven great ecumenical councils, Rome does not stop it at all.  The development of doctrine is not a nod to continuing revelation or an office with a conduit to the almighty but the admission that God is really no different than we are.  We access such a God with understanding and appreciation but not with dogma that is eternal.  God's mystery is cut down to size and becomes a solvable puzzle rather than something which must be grasped by faith and confessed without definition or explanation.  Sometimes I think we Lutherans have also forgotten this.  We want people to get worship when only God does -- it is His arena and His purpose and will which unfold within the Word that does what it says and the Sacraments that bestow what they sign.  We make ourselves too big when we presume to speak for Him what He has not said once forever.  We make ourselves too important when we assume that God is a nut to crack and an idea which evolves.  In the end, it also makes God small and relatively unimportant and certainly impotent when we elevate our own experience and characteristics into His and presume that this is God.  While the creeds do not go there, those who confess the creed seem transfixed by the idea that if God is more like us, all the problems of religion and the world will be solved.  What a joke! 

Lutheran question or not. . .

In a recent podcast I heard someone who teaches at one of our LCMS seminaries define the parameters of the worship wars or worship debates before us.  This is what he said:

". . . what is worship for Lutheran and then how do you construct worship within any particular congregational context that is appropriate for the life of that Christian community within that Lutheran Christian community within that within that context. So that's primary. . . "

That seems odd to me.  Worship is pretty well defined by our Confessions.  We have not abolished the Mass.  That is what we said.  We keep the mass not simply as a historic form but with more devotion than our opponents.  We are catholic in doctrine and in practice.  Worship is not an open question for Lutherans.  Unless, of course, we consider our confessional words on worship to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.  If that is the case, then who known what Lutheran worship really is?  Can it change from generation to generation or from year to year or from Sunday to Sunday?  Who gets to decide?  Is it a manifestation of the democratic vote of the people assembled?  Is it the realm of the Pastor alone?  Who constructs it?  According to what rules or guidelines?  Are there boundaries to what passes muster or is that simply for those assembled to define?  How do you define what is appropriate for the life of the Christian community and who decides?  Is it simply preference?  Is it the will of the majority?  Does it have anything to do with the confessional standards which apply to every congregation?

My concern here is not that everyone who deviates from the hymnal doing something which flows from the ordo but with different words is terrible.  What concerns me is that some (perhaps, many) among us approach the worship question without the application of the Confessional documents which bind us together.  Worship is not an open question in which there are no boundaries.  Worship is not adiaphora, not something outside the realm of our Confession.  Our Lord did not leave the details to us while giving us broad categories in which to do it.  He established clear patterns which are fully reflected in the early church and consistent down through the ages.  Inculturate does not mean to keep the Gospel but to embed it within a rite strictly local and reflective of the culture in which the people live.  There is something much more at stake here than if a demon is being worshiped.  Jesus has given us Word and Sacrament, a pattern within His own practice of synagogue and Temple, and lifted this out of a particular context of culture to apply to all cultures and all times.  The Church through the ages has made rather deliberate and plodding movements toward more uniformity for the sake of identity and for the proclamation of the faith.  While these are not distinctly the dictum of Christ, they are not to be dismissed as simply the practice of the time or custom.  Nowhere does the responsibility or authority for this become strictly local or the realm of preference -- at least until more modern times!

The Lutheran question is not what is worship and what do we want it to look like and what will fit us.  The Lutheran question about worship is what does Scripture say and what has the Church bequeathed to us and how can that be used without violating what Scripture says.  The Lutheran question is not about what we could do but what flows from our Confessions, given their deference to the forms and patterns and words they already knew before the Reformation.  After all, Luther's Formula Missae is a set of rubrics to be set inside the missals already on the altar and not a new invention to stand in opposition to what had been.  The Deutsche Messe is somewhat different but its primary principle is to substitute hymn paraphrases for the ordinary in place of the Latin texts.  Yet neither of these, whether good or bad, was made the Lutheran order.  The principles behind them might be worth our look for any Lutheran distinctive to liturgical theology.  The explosion of church orders was not a gift to the Church but a curse upon us that, at least within most Lutheran circles was rather narrow, but within the context of the wider Reformation became a free for all.  The Lutheran question does not begin with a blank piece of paper and a series of what ifs.  It begins with the historic Western Mass.  You may not like that but that is what Lutherans expected and anticipated.  So whether or not some things done in the name of Lutheranism are extreme or unfaithful, the whole question that begins with a loose idea of what probably ought to be included and yet see it all within the realm of whatever we deem appropriate is not the Lutheran question.  

A word I am over. . .

There is a word that is woven through the fabric of nearly every aspect of the Christian Church today.  You cannot avoid it.  It seems not to matter on what side of the theological divide one is, this word is ever present.  I wish I had a nickel for every time I have read it or heard it in the past ten years.  It is the word strategic.  Of course, you will not find it on Jesus' lips.  Indeed, the only instance of the word that I can find is a peculiar translation of the word usually rendered opportune.   It occurs in the NASB (1977 and 1995) not from Jesus or His disciples or anyone we should be paying attention to.  No, it came from the mouth of Herod.  You find it in Mark 6:21:  A strategic day came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his lords and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee;  Lest some of you might have forgotten, that strategic day came with the cost of John the Baptist's head on a platter.

We seem to love that word strategic.  We do strategic planning.  We order priorities strategically.  We develop a strategic vision.  It is not as simple as counting the cost or using wisely the resources entrusted to us.  Strategic seems to imply that we have a crystal ball in which to work so that we need to depend less upon God's grace and more upon our own abilities, skills, aptitudes, and creativity.  It is the byword for the modern era in Christianity.  Maybe you grew up with the game Strategy or maybe you remember how one President Bush seemed to butcher that word but this is no game and comedy in Christendom.  It is serious business -- the most serious business of all.

So this is one of the more benign versions, obviously directed more toward an individual than a church but similar in focus;

When we speak about strategic planning, it’s crucial for us to grasp its essence as it aligns with the wisdom found in the Bible. Strategic planning is about taking thoughtful steps toward achieving our long-term goals. The Bible teaches us the value of wisdom and strategy. By aligning our plans with God’s will, we can ensure that our decisions are informed and purposeful. The scripture encourages us to approach our lives with diligence, seeking God’s guidance in all our plans. This inevitably leads us toward success, fulfilling both our life’s aspirations and nurturing our relationship with God. It’s about seeking understanding and allowing God’s wisdom to unfold in our strategic plans. Just as we wouldn’t race forward without considering our path, our planning process must be deliberate and rooted in prayer. 

It sounds like the kid who knows what he wants and plans how to get mom or dad to go along.  There is not much strategic in that as much as it reflects the age old problem of trying to get God to agree with what we want and to enlist His support so that we will be successful or have someone to blame.  In any case, I am over strategic planning.  It often seems like we have done more damage to the Church by our planning and goal setting than we have simply meeting the Lord where He has chosen to be found, telling His saving acts among the nations, and living as the people He has called us to be.  I do wish we could be more strategic in that.