Every day in every way better. . .

The beautiful image of progress is indeed alluring.  Every day in every way we are getting better.  No one would deny that this is what we wish, what we hope to believe, and what we expect.  But is it true?  Can anyone realistically say that we are getting better and better as individuals, as families, as neighborhoods, as communities, as nations, and as a world?  

It is true, of course, that there are different ills, different sins, different problems, and different vices in every age and time.  They are not exactly the same but they are not exactly unique either.  Modernity has always brought with it its own slant on the age old sins of the commandments.  They are more often only more complicated than before and with more problematic consequences than before.  Those consequences are usually the increased numbers of victims and casualties we face because of this thing call progress.

We are pitiful in our defense of progress.  We point out with glee to the terrible things of the past that were once acceptable or tolerable or even promoted.  Slavery and misogyny are the typical things we name as areas in which we have made progress.  And we have.  But with this progress has come with a host of other problems which were never envisioned when race and sex caused some to be unfairly oppressed.  Our own willingness to accept and promote the death of countless millions in the womb while contemplating how to make death simply a choice for those who want it, when they want it, and painless to boot.  What about the increasing numbers of people who have given up on marriage or children and those who enter marriage and exit with impunity?  What about the promise of social media and its end result of cyber bullying and the incredible portion of its capacity devoted solely to porn?  What about the hopes placed in artificial intelligence and our seeming inability to distinguish between what machines say and do and people say and do?  What about the progress of technology that has come at what kind of cost to us -- costs in relationship, loneliness, and depression.  What about the grand expectations of the UN and world arenas designed to prevent or stop wars and the state of war and conflict that is literally all over the globe?  What about the attention given to the environment and climate change and the way we seem to use more dangerous and toxic minerals and elements without a thought to what to do with them when we are finished with them?      

There is no promise of improvement to the future.  In fact, the whole perspective of the Scriptures is just the opposite.  Things are not getting better.  Things are not improving at all.  The world is in a death ward spiral down.  It is not in an upward movement toward a better world but a world marred by sin and death reaching down further and further into this abyss.  That does not mean every part of technology is bad or every part of life is crap but it certainly diffuses the idea that we should have hope in our ability to sort out the past in the future and make it better.  We are not here to simply warn the world of this regress but to speak hope to the hopeless.  That does not pin such hope on a date in the past but on the one who alone can redeem the future with a new heaven and a new earth, one raised up through death to a life death cannot overcome and one in which the terrible cycle of sin and failure are finally ended.

One acquittal, one conviction. . .

Finland’s Supreme Court has acquitted Päivi Räsänen for her 2019 Bible verse tweet but Räsänen and Bishop Juhana Pohjola were found guilty in 3-2 decision for expressing their beliefs in a decades old church pamphlet  It was a narrow 3–2 decision, but the Finnish Supreme Court has agreed that disagreeing with the sacred tenets of gay marriage and LGBTQ+ rights is a criminal act guilty of hate speech. So after twenty years of legal wrangling, Räsänen has been criminally convicted for publishing the 2004 pamphlet for her church, along with Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola. The conviction is for “making and keeping available to the public a text that insults a group”. The Supreme Court unanimously acquitted Räsänen for her 2019 Bible verse tweet.  Räsänen was previously unanimously acquitted on all charges by two lower courts. 

The long serving parliamentarian and former Minister of the Interior has been convicted for “hate speech” under a section of the Finnish criminal code titled “war crimes and crimes against humanity”. The medical doctor and grandmother of twelve was tried in early 2022 and again in 2023 for expressing her beliefs in a 2019 tweet, which included a Bible verse, in addition to a 2019 radio debate and 2004 church booklet.  

After the prosecutor appealed for the second time, the Supreme Court, which heard the case in October 2025, has now ruled on two of the three original charges: concerning the tweet and the church booklet. The Supreme Court was not asked to rule on the radio debate as the prosecution did not appeal it, so Räsänen’s acquittal for the debate stands. 

“I am shocked and profoundly disappointed that the court has failed to recognize my basic human right to freedom of expression. I stand by the teachings of my Christian faith, and will continue to defend my and every person’s right to share their convictions in the public square.” stated Päivi Räsänen after receiving the judgment.

“I am taking legal advice on a possible appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. This is not about my free speech alone, but that of every person in Finland. A positive ruling would help to prevent other innocent people from experiencing the same ordeal for simply sharing their beliefs,” added Räsänen.  

This is one profound example of how far the so called Christian Europe has deviated from its roots and how orthodox Christianity has become that speech which is no longer tolerated.  So much for freedom. 

The rebellious teenager. . .

There is hardly a stereotype more common than the rebellious teenager who has come to reject everything of the parent and disown his own family.  Curiously, that might be the apt description of the state of the university today.  Everyone knows that the Church all but invented the university but the truth is that today it has all but divorced itself from the Church that gave it birth and a home for most of history.  You could take that one step further.  The university has become such a secular institution -- without respect or place for the Church -- that it cannot allow even token colleges who wish to own and live out their Christian identity.  That is surely the state of things today and it is also true for Lutheran universities who are hardly a realistic competitor for the big names in higher education.  It is also the dilemma for those institutions since they are tempted in both directions -- one which honors their Lutheran identity and is consistent with their Lutheran faith and one which minimizes both so that they enjoy the cache without being committed to all its articles of faith.

The reality is that a school like Luther Classical College is small and less than a blimp on the radar even for Lutheran schools.  The reality is that it is hard to imagine that Lutheran universities would ever begin to look like Hillsdale even though they drool at the prospect.  We do not have the history or the money or the reputation to make that possible.  So what does the Lutheran university look like?  That is the question plaguing every historic Lutheran college today.  What does that look like?  There are Lutheran identity statements which are engaging and positive but it is not the theory that is the problem.  It is living out this idea every day and finding good faculty and interested students to make it all possible.  Underneath the skin of all those decent Lutheran colleges is the desire to be in the big leagues, to become a world class institution and not simply a world class Lutheran institution.  That is the temptation.  We may not be able to play in the big leagues but we would like to be respected by them and appreciated for who we are and what we do.

Roman Catholic universities have surely bought into this desire.  Consider what I posted not long ago about Notre Dame.  It is not alone.  Nearly every Roman Catholic college and university has not only been drawn to the light like bugs on the back porch but has been willing to sacrifice much of its theological baggage and doctrinal fidelity to get the dream.  Honestly, I have trouble remembering the names of any Roman Catholic institutions of higher education which have actually traded the dream for fidelity.  Maybe you can supply some of the names to help me out on this point.  It is not just that these schools do not foster the Roman Catholic mission on their campuses but they seem to be working very hard to undermine that mission.  

Some of it is the employment of non-Roman Catholic faculty, staff, and leadership.  The lottery for big names who might give them secular credibility and attract the diminishing number of young people in our nation is hot.  So what if they do not own the doctrine or support the Roman Catholic mission or, even, contradict it?  Academic freedom demands you have some naysayers to argue against such things, right?  And what is the critical mass here?  How many faculty who dispute your doctrinal identity are enough and how many are too many?  Somebody once said a little bit of leaven leavens the whole lump... or something like that.

I wonder if it might be easier if we gave up the illusion that the Lutheran University is a mission to the unchurched students and world.  Oh, of course, that happens but that is and never was the reason for the Church to establish universities in the first place and it is not the reason why we Lutherans began our colleges.  All of those rationales were internal.  We needed church workers and we valued those church workers as teachers of the faith as well as pastors.  So we began a school in which the mission was to provide such church workers, especially pastors.  Has that changed?  Is that mission now replaced by preparing medical professionals, lawyers, engineers, and a host of other valuable people and occupations with a hint of religious education thrown in?  It does seem like the small numbers of church work students means that no one can really admit that this is the primary mission of nearly all of our schools.  What is the mission?  If we are a religious version of a secular school doing the same things that secular school does but with a twist, that is pretty expensive to provide and pretty expensive for the student.  Is that a credible mission?  Can we afford it?  Is it worthwhile?  Rome must be wondering the same thing.  They have so many more institutions to worry about and so many more schools to monitor to get it right. 

Anyway, those are some of the things I wonder about.  Will the rebellious teenager ever come back home and be happy to be there?  I can hope so but my record of predicting things is so pathetic.  We can pray and I suspect there are many praying with me.

Nine months to Christmas. . .

Today is March 25 so Merry Christmas!?  Don't get it?  Well, today is the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary.  Nine months from today, Jesus' birth will be celebrated.  Oh, sure, you probably have been sold the bill of goods that says that Christmas is some sort of pagan holiday that was taken over the Church to shut down the heathen and fill the gap with something more spiritual.  There are those who continue to spew the old saw that Christ is little more than a baptized version of a Roman, pagan winter solstice celebration. The false history, long ago debunked, is that the Church did not know what to do with this pagan celebration of the "sun" god and so it “Christianized” the celebration to given the recently converted pagans their day back but with its focus on Jesus instead of Saturn or Sol or whatever other pagan deity was associated with the switch from shortening days to longer ones.

The early Church did not celebrate Christmas much -- this is true -- but that was because the focus was centrally on the resurrection of Christ from the dead (Read what Paul wrote to the Corinthians).  This was the big deal -- dying and rising.  Easter remains the Queen of Seasons even though the marketplace has not done to Easter what it did to Christmas.  The date of Christmas was fixed not by pagan celebrations but by the passion and death of Christ.  In the West the date calculated was March 25 (in the East they used and still use a different calendar system).  March 25 was the first date fixed because at the time of Christ it was commonly held that prophets died on their birth or conception date. It’s the idea of “integral age,” as scholar William J. Tighe has noted in such detail. The Annunciation of our Lord to the Blessed Virgin Mary is liturgically celebrated on March 25, the date of Christ’s conception through the Word spoken by Gabriel and enacted by the Spirit.   In addition, you can read of the theologically-important connection between the womb and tomb in the work of  John Behr in The Mystery of Christ.  So because Christ died on the same date of the Annunciation (his conception), then Christmas Day has to be exactly nine months later OR March 25.

But this is not the only reason to interrupt Lent with this wonderful day of rejoicing.  For Blessed Mary is the first Christian (pondering all these things in her heart after consenting to the will of the Lord).  She is our own best example of faith under fire, of trust where eyes and experience say "no".  She is our mother in the faith and from her we learn what it means to believe the Word of the Lord (which came to her with more than an inconvenient message and one that challenged everything she had come to know and believe of life).  On this day we rejoice to stand with her before her Lord and ours, in whom we have forgiveness, life, and salvation.

Let me close this day with a little paragraph from Augustine from On The Trinity:

For He is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also He suffered; so the womb of the Virgin, in which He was conceived, where no one of mortals was begotten, corresponds to the new grave in which He was buried, wherein was never man laid, neither before nor since. But He was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th.

 

Liturgical without ceremony. . .

While reading of the decision of a former head of an Anglican seminary to enter Rome, I came across his apt description of how he was raised.  He said his upbringing in a Christian home was that of "using the Book of Common Prayer, liturgical without ceremony, earnest and lengthy in its preaching, sacramental but Protestant.”  It occurred to me that you could remove the Book of Common Prayer and insert The Lutheran Hymnal and it would exactly describe my own childhood in the faith.  I suspect that there are many who might agree.  

While I am not saying that this is awful or the worst context in which Lutheranism is expressed, I must admit that it ended up not being all that compelling.  "Liturgical without ceremony" was exactly how the Divine Service was conducted growing up Lutheran in the 1950s and 1960s -- at least the four times annually when the full Divine Service was held.  Of course, the "dry" Mass hastily concluded after the offering and prayers with a benediction and dismissal was conducted in exactly the same "liturgical without ceremony" manner.  It was decent and in good order but it was also clear to me that this was a form which was followed because that was who we "Lutherans" were but not because this was essential or flowed from our Confession.  We simply did what was in the book with little fanfare.  Again, it is not that this was terrible but was it really who we were as Lutherans?

"Ernest and lengthy in its preaching" was what I heard from the pulpit.  The sermons were generally based on a series of preaching texts popular at the time and thus distanced the sermon from its context within the liturgy and encouraged it to stand on its own, apart from the rest of the Divine Service.  Indeed, it was as if the rest of the liturgy was either unrelated to the sermon or simply the preparation for it but, in any case, the sermon was clearly the main deal.  The preaching was generally very earnest.  It may have lacked some in passion and delivery but not in content or form.  I was regularly preached into the faith in very large forty minute segments each Sunday.  They were Biblical and confessional yet often oblivious to the liturgical year (except in the high and holy Sundays).  They were doctrinal and expressed to, if not convinced, the hearer of what we believe, teach, and confess.  Notably absent were sermons about baptism, the Eucharist, or confession and absolution.  These things, presumed by our Confessions to be the realm in which the Christian lived out his life of faith and his calling in Christ, were largely treated tangentially -- even when the text mentioned them explicitly.

"Sacramental but Protestant" also resonates with me.  It was obvious that we held to Sacraments but more in theory than in practice and life.  We were not expected to cling to the promises made in water, bread, wine, and a voice in confession the way we clung to the Word of God but we did believe in those things.  Sort of like those who believe alcohol consumption is not bad and might be fine but who drink seldom.  We agreed in theory to their worth and value but Sundays were meant for preaching and the Eucharist was always an "add on" to the Service of the Word.  Again, this is not the worst one could experience but it was not exactly the faithful vision confessed in our formative documents or even in Luther (overall).  Protestant was clearly who we were.  We would stand with the Methodists and Presbyterians and Evangelical Covenant people but we were noticeably uncomfortable around Roman Catholics.  We envisioned ourselves less as the evangelical catholics of the Augustana than a type of typical Protestant who had a peculiar Sunday morning habit.  We were warned against going to a Roman Catholic Church but we were also cautioned against going anywhere that was not us (the jurisdiction included here).  Yes, we did regard ourselves as the original and most authentic Protestants but Protestant just the same.  

The problem with this is that it lacks a compelling identity.  Worship simply becomes worship, divorced from Confession and maybe even at odds with it.  Doctrine becomes theory that is held rightly in the mind but not prayed in the liturgy.  Protestant means that we can be other kinds of Protestant and not sacrifice what we believe, teach, and confess -- like the Lutheran who becomes a Baptist and consoles himself that their high view of Scripture and inerrancy balances out their rejection of baptismal efficacy.  And that is why so many Lutherans who marry Protestants assume that their conversion to another form of Protestantism does not mean all that much.  I fear that this is at least part of the reason for the many defections from Lutheranism over the years although not entirely responsible for them.  At least that is the view from one who grew up "liturgical without ceremony, earnest and lengthy in its preaching, sacramental but Protestant.”