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.