We are catholic or Catholic (frankly, I have never understood the problem with the capital letter). We insist this in our first confession and have not recanted. So confessionally, we do claim an identity but not the Protestant one. As loathe as some Lutherans are to admit it, this is unequivocally true. To be at war with your catholic identity is to be at war not with Rome but with yourself. This is the problem with Lutherans. We have become so comfortable in the contrived identity we have wrapped ourselves in that we no longer feel at home in our own confessional identity. So yes, we better get over our difficulty saying that we catholic and we better learn to say that word with conviction or we will risk becoming who we imagine ourselves to be and thus be lumped upon the rather inconsequential mound of other Protestants mostly dying or already dead.
This is NOT about a word but about an identity. Some years ago I asked a Bible study why people were Lutheran. They spoke about being raised Lutheran or marrying into the Lutheran Church or finding a compromise between a Roman Catholic and Protestant home after their wedding. Then someone actually said that unless you were baptized and confirmed and raised a Lutheran, that person did not know why anyone would become Lutheran or we would try to make them Lutheran. Yup. There you have it. We did not simply lose a word from our vocabulary but an identity. When I said that there was only one reason to be Lutheran and that was because Lutherans hold the true catholic and apostolic faith, there was an uproar. But what about my kids who were confirmed Lutheran and ended up at some cool named non-denom down the street? Or the Methodist Church my in-laws attend? And so on.... In their minds, the only tenable position was to believe that no church had the truth and every church had enough bits and pieces for one to be saved and everyone should stay who they are.
Times have changed. We have made significant progress in debunking the myth of the high road and low road that all lead to heaven -- at least in my own congregation. But what stands out to many who visit or some who come as vagabonds from the broken remnants of their tradition is that we really do mean it. Lutheranism preserves the one true catholic and apostolic faith. We are the catholics who hold to Scripture, who live within the lively tradition of the faith once delivered and passed down to us, and who take seriously the confession once made and still held. Rome's catholicity is compromised by the very existence of an inerrant papal office and by the doctrines of which Scripture knows nothing but they insist must be believed. The Eastern Churches are largely ethnic and their doctrinal and confessional identity is stunted to 787 AD. Lutheran church structures are a mess, to be sure, but the faith confessed is solid, Biblical, catholic, and apostolic. Sadly, Lutherans themselves are still overall more at home under the banner of Protestant than they are as Catholic. Who in their right mind wants to belong to a communion which has it wrong? Or partially wrong? Or mostly wrong? Let the Scriptures be the judge and arbiter of truth. The Roman claim to an inerrant church that invents the Scriptures is really nothing less than a claim for the papacy and a man who gets to say yay or nay. Can anyone reasonably believe that this is what the apostles thought? The East rests its claims on ecumenical councils and consensus that anyone and everyone knows err, disagree, and are in conflict with each other. We Lutherans have it all except in our minds we think too little of it. Content to be Protestant, we just may die as an institution while our faith lives on.
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