Some time later, well, a couple of years later on Trinity Sunday to be exact, I had an epiphany while we confessed the Athanasian Creed. The particular part of the creed is the beginning.
Whoever desires to be saved must, above all, hold the catholic faith.
Whoever does not keep it whole and undefiled will without doubt perish eternally.
And the catholic faith is this,
that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.
The point of the evangelistic work of the Church is not simply to address the individual with the Word of the Lord through which the Spirit works but to order them rightly before God -- so they may worship the Lord -- joining in the baptized who gather in the name of the Lord, absolved of their sins, catechized by the Word preached, and fed and nourished upon the Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist. The creed connects what we so easily disconnect and therefore lose -- the connection between faith and worship. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy always go hand in hand or something is wrong. Or, to put it in older terminology, lex orandi, lex credendi. Theology must sing (so said Norman Nagel). Doctrine and our belief in that doctrine do not live in the imaginary world of intention or even in theory. They live in the real world of worship, prayer, and service. It is, to borrow Luther's phrase, so that we might thank, praise, serve, and obey the Lord that He brings us into faith and into the lively fellowship of those who believe. To put it bluntly, it is impossible to bring someone to Jesus without also bringing them to the Church where Jesus is worshiped and wherein He serves His people with the gifts of His obedient life, life-giving death, and victorious resurrection.
Salvation was never such an individual pursuit or gift that it neglected the fullness of the Church's life around the Word and Sacraments here and now nor was it ever meant to bestow a relationship which was singular and not communal. Perhaps this is why we have such trouble understanding how God worked with Israel, the role of the remnant, and the mercy of the Lord in general. The nuance lost is that somehow you can bring someone to Jesus while that same person remains a stranger to the place where His name is invoked in prayer, His water washes clean, His voice absolves, His Word speaks and accomplishes what it says, and His food feeds soul and body to everlasting life. If we as Lutherans cannot get this right, we have gotten something very important wrong.
2 comments:
"On the other hand, there were those, me included, who complained that it was impossible to bring people to Christ without connecting them to where Christ is, dispensing His gifts through the means of grace."
While bringing people to a local congregation is often how people become Christian and members of a congregation, describing bringing people to Christ without connecting them to a local congregation as "Impossible" is too extreme. (Acts 8:26-40)
We must finally come to the conclusion and accept the fact that the Catholic Church is plainly speaking, a false church. Worship of Christ accompanies worship of Mary and numberless dead saints, so designated by the church alone, and Papal edict, not by God. The Pope cannot speak in the place of Jesus, he cannot be inerrant in his proclamations, and he cannot preach a works Gospel and be in line with the scriptures. The church was unaffected by the Reformation, stood fast in proclaiming false doctrines, and persecuted and martyred those who followed biblical authority. The Catholic Church will not relent. It is up to believers who find themselves in this body to leave immediately and seek a faithful church elsewhere.
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