The realm of the holy. . .

Those things which cannot be challenged but must be affirmed are no longer simple truths or opinions.  They have moved past the secular and into the realm of religion.  They become the holy truths which must be affirmed.  They are belief, to be sure, but the unchallenged belief that form the fabric of the sacred or holy which is also the realm of God.  This is no longer the God of His own disclosing, the God of the wholly other who makes Himself known to us.  No, this is the God of our choosing, the God whom we have was born of our opinion and then created as the holy when those opinion changed into the sacred truths which could not be challenged or disputed anymore.  This is exactly like the God created by Israel from a golden calf but no one who holds these truths to be self-evident would admit it.  It is why our culture refuses to honor the ancient faith but remains religious.  It is a religion whose sacraments are not means of grace but the sacred rituals of the ballot box or the social media where truth is now affirmed.  It also explains why we remain so divided as a people and why uniting us is such a monumental task.  It is like trying to reconcile the actual beliefs of Islam and Christianity instead of simply trying to find commonalities within those faiths.  Sure, you can find things in common between the two religions with sacred text and holy histories but there is, in reality, nothing that could possibly unite the two.  They are fundamentally at odds with each other.  Their truths do not intersect in any fundamental way.

So it is for those who hold to the sacred tenets of feminism or homosexuality or gender invention.  There may be things we find in common but these are fundamentally at odds with the essential truths of both religions.  Yes, the deities of sexual desire and gender identity are a religion, a religion of belief that transcends logic, DNA, and even the body itself.  They are not incidental to those who hold to them but the grounding truths that organize and construct their self-identity and their worldview.  It is also the same for those on the opposite side who view President Trump as savior of their world order and the only means to any future they want to have.  We have entered the day when it seems impossible to hold to one view or another on the issues before us and still remain friendly with those who hold the opposite views.  Politeness may be about all we can expect but accommodation is harder than ever to find.  That is because what is held has become religious truth with its own doctrinal test of orthodoxy and its test of fellowship and unity.

There was once the possibility that Republicans and Democrats could espouse very different political views and still worship in the same pew.  Now the political views have transcended into religious truths and with that has come the inability to fellowship with those who have the nerve to disagree or to see things differently.  It is the reason why Washington has become such a polarized place, why there are fewer and fewer who can venture across the aisle to form constructive partnerships, and why it is essential to destroy your enemies.  I wish I could say that it was one sided and that it all was the fault of the political left.  It is not.  At some point I think we all know this.  Neither extreme wants to admit this and so the left is characterized as godless when they do have a god and sacred truth but the right is attracted to a Christian nationalism that has little in common with orthodox and catholic Christianity.  It may also be the reason why global religions are increasingly fractured and why it is so hard to repair these fractures.  Rome finds the Latin Mass and existential problem and so the left insists it has to go and the right insists it has to stay.  Anglicans fight over the name but the current Canterbury and GAFCAN (among others) represent very different versions of Christian truth and doctrine and not simply a sexual issue divide.  ELCA Lutherans and Missouri Lutherans are not simply different versions of the same essential confession but radically different takes on that confession and mutually exclusive takes at that.  In the midst of it all there are those who speak a common language and have a common worldview even though they have differences of opinion.  I fear that group is growing smaller.  Christianity will become even more fractured -- not because of the dispute over classically Christian dogma but over how much of the sacred order from the Kingdom of the left can be included within the body of belief without destroying the Christian.  It is not that nothing is sacred anymore but what is sacred is no longer bounded by Scripture and sacred tradition.  Religion has not ceased to before a force but it is a new religion whose creeds and confessions are informed less by sacred revelation than by unassailable truth which dare not be challenged and whose preeminence must be accepted in order to belong.  That means it has become its own religion in a society increasingly hostile to orthodox Christianity but not yet secular.

The problem with "satis est"

Everyone is agreed upon what the Latin satis est means.  There is no confusion there.  It is enough.  But from there on out we seem not to know what to do with that statement.  "And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments" (Et ad venam unitatem ecclesiae satis est consentire de doctrina evangelica et administratione sacramentorum). So reads one of the most important sentences in the Augsburg Confession. Coming between a definition of the "one holy Church" and the rejection of the Romanist teaching that human traditions, rites or ceremonies instituted by men, must everywhere be alike, this is a key statement of the Augustana on the nature of the Church's unity.  We all know and are pretty much agreed on what satis est means even though we cannot seem to come to any unanimity on what "the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments" means.  But the latter is for another post.  This one is about the simple phrase it is enough.

AC VII confesses that the church is located or found where the gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered (Est autem ecclesia congregatio sanctorum, in qua evangelium
recte docetur et recte administrantur sacramenta).  We all know the simple and yet profound truth of this assertion.  Of course, there is a dispute about what rightly preached and rightly administered means.  We are still trying to figure that out in a way that everyone can affirm.  Even within Missouri there seems to be division over what these words mean as they are unpacked in practice.  But we dare not get to far ahead of the words "it is enough" or, it is sufficient.  For the point here is not to discourage a higher level of unity and uniformity in words and practices (church usages) but to admit that it need not be required to go beyond the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments, the twin markers that locate the true Church.  I would suggest that we have misstated these words in such a way that it is too often seen as interfering or domineering to suggest that more unity and uniformity could or should be the goal.  That is what we find in the original constitution of the Missouri Synod at least until 1979 when it was changed (and as to what that means might be answered down the road).

It is wearisome to have people insist that less is more, that the minimal satisfaction of what must be required for the unity of the Church is all that anyone needs to strive for or be satisfied with.  That is simply not the case.  The original constitution of the Missouri Synod called for a higher standard, namely, to strive for the highest possible uniformity and unity of doctrine and church practice (a word that has evolved in meaning but at least means rites and ceremonies).  This took concrete shape in the requirement that members of the Synod exclusively use doctrinally pure agendas and hymnbooks and catechisms and was further expounded by the early intention of the Synod to form a publishing house to produce exactly those doctrinally pure agendas, hymnbooks, and catechisms.  The aim for a higher degree of unity and uniformity does not mitigate against Augustana VII but accurately understands the difference between what must be required for basic unity and what should be fostered for the well-being of the Church.  It is high time that we admit that satis est does not mean the most that can or should be the aim of the churches in their walk together.  There is nothing wrong or unseemly or against Augustana VII to strive for more, to expect more, and to call each other to account for the more that is a profound benefit to the Church.

It is frustrating that we as a Synod seem hesitant to say this and felt the need to try to incorporate responsible variety as an equivalent aim or goal in 1979.  Of course, the context of 1979 was not evangelical, seeker style, casual, non-liturgical worship services but the conflict just begun with a cooperative hymnal effort rejected and the Synod pursuing its own book.  Responsible variety then meant more the LBW/TLH/WS 1969, etc., mix of books and rites than it ever foresaw or expected the kind of thing typical among some folks today.  So, while the Synod modified the constitution to include responsible variety, it did not retract the goal of a higher level of unity and uniformity which was for the good of the Church, for the benefit of the congregations and their ministers, and for the benefit of the people in those congregations.  It may be enough to have a minimal standard for the sake of unity but that does not and has never meant no more needed to be the aim or the striving for of those within and those seeking to be in fellowship with the LCMS.  Satis est was never a mere matter of how little you can get by with but where you begin -- with where you end up being far and away nearer unity and uniformity in the fullest sense of those terms.

What insight!

The Pontifical Biblical Commission of the Vatican has declared, following a “thorough biblical study” commissioned by then-Pope Francis [only now concluded], that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah—for which the two cities were exterminated and struck down—was not due to a acts of homosexual depravity (Sodomia) by their inhabitants, but rather the “rejection of the immigrant.” 

So now we know better after getting it wrong all these years.  This is the level of scholarship in the Pontifical Biblical Commission today and this is good example of the erroneous conclusions a failed higher critical methodology leads to when we treat God's Word as merely another book!  I can only imagine that the lavender mafia in Rome and its champion in Fr. James Martin feel affirmed by this conclusion that it is only a matter of time before Rome makes what was once disorder normal.  And I thought that Rome might be changing after their time in the wilderness under Francis.  Boy was I wrong.

It is as if someone woke up to realize that the Latin Mass was not the big problem but a church body which no longer valued or listened to the voice of God's Word.  This makes the case for the much parodied sola Scriptura of Lutheran and Protestant confession.  It also makes the case for an historical grammatical methodology which does not begin with the presumption that God's book is just like any other book and can be unpacked with benefit of faith in its teaching.  We can only expect the Rome will continue to lead the way into more politically relevant and modern interpretations which defy what the Church has said and faithful teachers have taught and faithful people have heard.  This is the very thing that betrays the claims of catholicity Rome has made and reveals itself to be still living under its own Babylonian captivity to the voice of progressivism.  This is the kind of novelty the Lutheran confessors insisted was typical of Rome and a betrayal of the unanimity of the church fathers which is not a elevating tradition above God's Word but seeing how that Word lives within that tradition. 

In the end this is not really about homosexual behavior at all but about the way -- the easy way -- some work around what God's Word actually says and cast aside the witness of the ages in the form of what the Church has understood and taught.  We are facing a time when the great temptation before us is not simply to ignore the passages of Scripture we do not like or find hard to defend in modern times but simply rewrite or interpret anew what has always been understood and taught. 

The problems before us. . .

While some may suggest that the problem of the moment is doctrinal in nature and specific to the fuzziness we have come to accept as normal in our doctrinal confession, others might insist that it is bad preaching and preachers that are the problem.  Still others might complain that the liturgical chaos that is typical of the either intentional pushing of the limits or the consequence of a casual treatment of the things of God.  Finally, there are those who insist that we are losing people we never had, those who were never really formed in the faith and planted upon the good soil of faithful confession and life within the community of the baptized.  I would suggest that no single problem is the cause for the Church's woes today but that our present crisis is really due to them all -- doctrinal confusion, weak preaching, liturgical disorder, and inadequate formation/catechesis.   Because we are suffering from the combined effect of them all, we need to address all of them and sooner rather than later.

Doctrinal clarity is not the result of more nuanced doctrinal statements.  Words are not the problem although they are certainly part of it all.  Meaning what we say is at the root of it.  It is not a crisis of content but of conviction, a problem of faith.  Let me be clear, the great mysteries of the faith are not puzzles to be solved but doctrines which we accept by faith, trusting in the voice of God's Word to speak to us and for us rather than some sort of game to play in which the goal is to crack the nut.  We cannot do much better than the creeds to say who God is and who He is not (Athanasian Creed) as the Holy Trinity.  It is the same for the mystery of the two natures of Christ.  God has not given us this as some kind of treasure trail to follow to get to the moment of understanding or comprehension but the mystery is the thing, believed and confessed as God has revealed it.  The problem of doctrinal clarity is not crying out for more creeds or newer ones or better expressions of this we believe.  No, doctrinal clarity comes from saying what God has said publicly and confidently over and over and over again until it resides in us and the world hears us making the good confession.

Weak preaching does not mean preaching error.  It can mean predictable preaching that keeps saying the same things over and over again without actually preaching the text and applying God's Word to who we are and where we are today.  I maintain that preaching only justification is the same problem as not preaching it at all.  So what?  What does this mean for who I am and how then I shall live as a child of God?  Weak preaching is preaching too much until nothing is clear and people struggle to take away from the sermon a handle to hold onto God's Word during the week.  Weak preaching is giving too much time to stories or introductions or jokes or a thousand other little tricks preachers use to mask not knowing or preaching the text faithfully.  Rome is stereotypical of a church body which has forgotten what it means to preach and has turned the whole preaching enterprise into a simple moralistic pep talk.  Protestantism has turned the sermon on its head until what we think of what God has said becomes more important than what He has said.  Perhaps preachers need to read and hear good sermons for a while before they put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) but it would not hurt to remember to look at the people to whom you are preaching and to speak with conviction and not simply to inform.

Lutherans have their own problems with liturgical chaos on Sunday morning but neither is Rome exempt.  Honestly, for all the problems you might find in an evangelical style Lutheran setting, last time I checked we did not have priests dressed up as chickens or clowns or rappers in chasubles and the like.  Rome seems to think that those who play at worship are a bigger problem than those who want to worship in Latin.   I think we Lutherans might have a few Latin sympathizers but our problem is simply too much latitude and too great a temptation on both sides of the worship wars to admit that we are talking adiaphora here instead of talking about worship words, actions, and forms consistent with what we say we confess.  A spare liturgical style is not as offensive to our Confession as one without any real style but with far too much designed merely to entertain or encourage.  Honestly, if worship is where we encounter the mystery of the faith, we ought to at least approach it with some sense of solemnity, reverence, and awe.

Finally, we must admit that a couple of hours of catechetical instruction as a pre-teen or early teenager OR as an adult is not and is never enough to form a person in the faith.  The liturgy is our primary teacher and through the Divine Service we are nurtured in the faith once taught and once confessed and now owned today.  It is not a matter of finding better catechetical materials or using screens or more modern teaching methodology but of owning the faith, ordering our worldviews by its lens, and understanding who we are and why we are in the midst of it all.  Our journey into the presence of God is not the pursuit of an extravagant moment outside ourselves but of nourishing the life born anew through from the baptismal womb and living in pursuit of its ends while living within the shape of this present moment.  We are not catechized primarily by explaining the faith but of confessing it over and over and over again until it lives within us, being called and living by the voice in the ear of God's Word and guided by that same voice to the place where His flesh once given for the life of the world becomes our spiritual food for the way.  Faith is not a feeling which comes and goes like the clothing we wear and then cast aside but the latitude and longitude of our lives, identified according to God's order and living to fulfill His purpose and calling.

All of these are the urgent pursuits of the day and all of these are the reason why we find ourselves so often in crisis mode.  When we fail at these, we are buffeted by the winds of change and lifted from the mooring lines that hold us fast in the grasp of grace.  All of these ought to be our pursuit whether or not the world finds them interesting or compelling or relevant and even when our own folks begin to wonder why we spend so much time on basics instead of graduating to a higher level of engagement with the mystery of God.  These are not basics meant to get out of the way before we meet the higher and deeper truths of who we are and who God is.  These are, instead, the constant litany or refrain of our Christian lives and calling, the well worn trail we follow over and over again.  We discern the fuller meaning not by growing up or past these but precisely by the constant pursuit of doctrinal clarity, faithful preaching, liturgical integrity, and catechetical formation in the faith.   

Too successful?

This past summer was hard on Europe.  Temperatures were high and the people miserable in an area in which air conditioning was not typical for most homes.  You certainly about it in the news.  It was actually worse than most of us probably imagined.  Of course, climate change was blamed.  It was all man's fault for polluting and disturbing the pristine balance of nature.  Everyone had come to believe that unless we figured out a way to clean up our act, the world was doomed.  Who thought it could have been otherwise?

Now even those who are on the climate change bandwagon are coming to a very interesting conclusion.  

“From 1980, Europe warmed around 1C more than the average of extratropical areas of the Northern Hemisphere, and around 1.5C more than the global average. . . . Most of this excess warming over Europe can be linked to the reduction of particle emissions,” Pedro Roldán‐Gómez, an associate researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, told The Telegraph.

The reduction in air pollution has caused an increase in temperatures that is particularly pronounced at the poles. When the temperature difference between the poles and the equator shrinks, the jet stream grows stagnant, which results in weather systems, like the recent hot spells in Europe, persisting for longer periods.

Europe has warmed at twice the rate of the rest of the world since the 1980s, resulting in deadly heat waves that environmental activists and politicians have attributed to carbon emissions. But according to the study, the opposite is true: Much of the increase in temperature can be attributed to Europe’s recent success in reducing the amount of airborne particulate matter, since such pollution acts as a sunshade. 

In other words, the problems evident in Europe's heat wave were also of man's doing but not because he was being irresponsible and raping the good earth of God's creation but because they were trying to repair the wrongs done by those before.  Cleaning up the problem results in its own set of circumstances that become a new problem for us to deal with.  My point here is not to argue for or against climate change but to point out how deeply the problems of our world are established by sin and how it is impossible for us to fix our own problems.  We cannot save but need a Savior who can.  Only the God who created all things can come to our aid and repair what we have ruined.

While it might seem the responsible thing to pick up after our own mess and it is surely the right thing for us to do, that does not mean that we can repair the wrong and restore what we have broken.  It is a good and helpful thing for a parent to call a child to account for making a mess and for calling that child to pick up the mess and make right what he has made wrong even when the parent knows the child cannot possibly do it all on his or her own.  God watches us even when we are trying to do what is right and yet He understands what we do not.  We cannot fix it or make the mess go away.  That is how deeply sin is embedded into the fabric of creation and why it groans not for us as responsible adult people to take notice of and responsibility for what we  have screwed up but for the One to come who alone can answer this longing with real new birth and an everlasting creation.  Right here in climate change and the ecological work of those intending to repair the wrong is evidence that we need a God to do for us what we cannot do -- a God to fix the Fall and repair what sin has done not simply to the soul of man but to the whole of the world God made.

We want a king. . .

Much has been said about how George Washington could have become King George I of the United States but turned back both the honor and the responsibility.  Perhaps the evolution of the office in the years since the could have been King George might be explained in the desire to make a king out of whoever in habits that office.  The imperial presidency is really just a catchall term for the election of a monarch -- albeit one with limited terms of office since FDR.   Perhaps we are simply a people in search of a monarch to rule us the way we want to be ruled.  I get it.  Democracy is a messy business and, even if you cannot necessarily find a better alternative, that does not mean it is any less messy.  Congress says they want to be a power and force to be reckoned with but the people's house is a group of folks concentrating on the next election right after they have won the previous one and the Senate is a series of little fiefdoms with potentates who only reluctantly agree on anything.  A king would be nice.  Somebody to demand what we want from and somebody to blame when it all goes South.

Israel wanted a king and was not happy that God had saddled them with something less than what they thought they deserved and everyone else had.  We all know how that turned out.  Can anyone really recite the list of those kings no one wants to remember?  In Scripture it ends up being something like so and so went and did what was evil in God's sight and then slept with the fishes ancestors who had done the same.  Boring and disappointing all at once.  It surely did not keep them from claiming the Roman imposed version of a monarch as their own even though they hated the thought of it all.  There is something about a king, after all.  I guess that it is in our blood to want someone whom we think has the power to change everything and someone to blame for not changing it the way we want it.  Give them cake became give them a king and make them regret it.  The king or president ceased to be merely the highest authority within the structure of the social order to become instead the very embodiment of the sovereign State.

Rome has certainly evolved the papacy into a kingly sort of office.  Papolatry had its roots far earlier than Vatican I but it has not been abandoned even as the mythology of democracy has also evolved.   We may find the worship of the pope to be a thing baffling, strange and contradictory, but it is perfectly reasonable why Rome wants to turn the pope into a king.  "Whatever the pope says because the pope says it.”  It does not seem to matter who the pope is.  It does not even matter when he contradicts other popes or even himself -- walking back one day what he say the day before. The papacy has become the ultra institution of Rome and nothing else seems to matter -- unless you are on the opposite side of the pope when suddenly you agree with all the critics.  Rome does not want a pope but a ruling monarch both to blame and to sit in the place of God with wisdom and an all knowing soul -- eve without a guarantee he will always be right.

Lutherans are not far behind.  Missouri is perhaps the most democratic of the governance forms of American Lutheranism yet we want a benevolent monarch as much as the next guy.   Whether in clericals or a shirt and tie,  expect our Synod President to move on a dime in pursuit of what we want and to be slow as molasses to stop what we wish continued.  We blame him for everything that is wrong in Synod without acknowledging his role in making things right.  We get a little testy when we think he has gone too far as well as when we believe he has not gone far enough.  In short, we also want a king.  We want a benevolent monarch who is nearly always right when we agree and willing to take back what we do not like or agree with.  We expect him to honor the good institutions and correct the ones not so good, to know who to appoint where and who to can when they have done wrong but to do it in a proper pastoral way -- a humble monarch at least.  We want a king whom we can predict and control and who looks good on camera as he benignly goes about our business.  Like the Garden of Eden, we say we want freedom but blame King God I when things happen as He said they would but we were not listening.  It is probably no different in any church which cares about things like doctrine and practice.  We do not want a president or even a bishop but would like a king who acts decisively when we think it necessary and patiently when the spy glass is on us.  Ride on King Jesus and those who minister in His name -- at least so far as He is riding where we want Him to go.  It seldom seems that we are ready for any kind of cross bearing or suffering but we are perfectly willing to be the cause os some of that. 

A choice between synagogue and temple?

Often Roman Catholics insist that Protestants do not really know what worship is.  They complain that the Temple is missing from Protestant worship, that there is no sacrifice, and that there is no sacrament.  I suppose there is truth in all of this.  Protestants have chosen the synagogue as their model - not the Temple.   Indeed, Protestant worship seems to be thoroughly indebted to the model of Jewish synagogues: “To this day Protestant worship is indebted to [synagogues’] emphasis on prayer, Scripture reading, teaching, lay involvement, and elder rule” (as one Baptist put it).  Honestly, there are plenty similarities between what is typically found in most Protestant churches on Sunday morning and what would ordinarily be found in a first-century synagogue (example Luke 4:16-21; Acts 13:15,27). 

Jesus was found in the synagogue regularly.  You cannot accuse Him of ignoring what happened in the synagogue and He accepted the scroll to read from Isaiah and then to preach the text in one of those synagogues.  It would be a false presumption that Jesus did not consider what happened in the synagogue important or well connected to the piety and worship lives of Jews and those who would come after Him.  Catechesis, the likes of which you would have found in the synagogue, continued in the early church and down to the present day.  The synagogue was clearly that place where religious instruction took place and the ordinary place for what we would call preaching.  We have this on record; Jesus gave the Bread of Life discourse “in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum” (John 6:59).  Undoubtedly, it was also a place where people prayed but the House of Prayer which Jesus cleansed was not the synagogue but the Temple.  Only an idiot would suggest no one prayed in the synagogue but what happens today in the synagogue has been altered by the fact that there is no Temple to be a House of Prayer anymore - at least since its destruction in 70AD.  Indeed, Jesus not only visited the synagogue but commanded His disciples to do the same, following His own example: “[going] about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity” (Matt. 9:35).  Indeed, the criticism Jesus has of public prayer in the warning given in the Sermon on the Mount was not directed to the prayers of the Temple particularly but in the public places of the synagogue and street corner - where people were watching but God was not paying attention since it was clear it was not directed to Him.   No, Jesus was clearly in the habit of attending synagogue weekly (Luke 4:16)

Rome knows this and has cultured the Mass into the worship of the Temple.  Yes, it is spoken of as sacrament but it is primarily sacrifice.  The sacrifice of the Mass was, after all, a key point in the Reformation.  But Rome seems to have forgotten the synagogue.  Preaching has not quite been a strong point in Rome and, if you check modern Roman Catholic blogs and such, preaching is still a touchy subject.  Nearly everyone admits that preaching is weak and often moralistic in a typical Roman Catholic Mass.  Sure, there are exceptions, but just as Protestants have chosen to model the synagogue, Rome has chosen the altar and the sacrifice they insist is the most important thing happening in the Lord's House -- even more important than actually receiving communion!  If Protestants have gotten it wrong, I would suggest Rome has as well.  By their singular focus on the holy sacrifice of the Mass, they have attempted to rebuild the Temple in the sanctuaries of Roman churches and continued the sacrifice at the altar - though unbloody - with the people praying during the Mass as if they had no real part in it except to pray.  So instead of receiving the sacrament during the Mass, communion happened outside the Mass or while the Mass was going on and the people were there to pray the Rosary.  Praying and being near where the sacrifice of the Mass was offered is enough.  Though that opinion is not universal, it is probably typical in Rome.

But there need not be a choice.  In Lutheranism, the Divine Service preserves both the synagogue and the Temple.  It is the place of preaching and instruction and catechesis in a high understanding of the reading of Scripture and its explanation and application in a sermon which has an equally high place.  But the prayers are not peripheral nor even individual.  Prayer is the language of worship that permeates the Divine Service and culminates in the prayerful proclamation of the Verba Christi and the Our Father.  The Temple is there not to recreate the sacrifices of old or the one, all-sufficient sacrifice of Calvary but to distribute its fruits in the flesh and blood of Christ given to us to eat and drink in faith in remembrance of Him for the forgiveness of our sins.  It is the Temple fulfilled and transformed so that in His name and by His own Word we worship in Spirit and in truth, eating the drinking the foretaste of the eternal feast right here and right now.  In response to God's goodness, grace, and mercy, we offer Him the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving not simply in a few ritual words but in lives offered as living sacrifices.  It is all there in the Divine Service and in the high place given to preaching AND the sacrament that is the hallmark of Lutheran worship theology and practice.

Walther saw this when he got to America and complained about lecture halls that had replaced the sanctuaries in which Word and Meal were the center piece of the gathering of God's people and the marks of the Church which identified God's House to the world.  When Lutherans forget this and their own Confessions and end up sounding like Protestants, we betray our identity and our claim to be the catholic and apostolic church, keeping the faith in pure doctrine and right practice against those who would divide it up or choose sides (like Protestants and Rome).  When Walther insisted that we chant, wear vestments, use candles, have altars, etc..., he was marrying together what God had always meant to be together and which Protestants had forsaken along with Rome for merely half of the whole.  Worship is not a choice between them but the embrace of the fullness of both.  I will admit that Lutherans themselves forgot this for a time when they kept the Eucharist in theory but reduced it to a rare practice (growing up for me that meant four times a year!).  This is the bronze age error which the liturgical movement among Lutherans has challenged and the Eucharistic revival is evidence of recalling who we were and are.  At the same time, it should not come at the cost of faithful preaching.  We own both -- the tradition of the synagogue in the liturgy of the Word and the tradition of the Temple fulfilled in the Upper Room in the liturgy of the Meal.  To have one without the other is to misunderstand what worship is and what God not simply calls it to be but has provided it to be.  The Word will not return to Him empty but will accomplish His purpose and Christ will never fail to be there given and shed for us in the Holy Supper - a presence not limited to those who believe it but to all who commune and hence the centrality of faithful discipline of the Table (close(d) communion). 

"Old" Catholics. . .

The first time I stumbled across the name Old Catholic Church, I did not know what to make of it.  Eventually I discovered that this was a specific thing, or several things, as it were.  Apparently, there was significant push back in Germany after Vatican I.   They were not alone in questioning the dogma of infallibility that was the hallmark of that council but saw it as the worst kind of innovation and contrary to the faith of the Catholic Church.  Eventually, they would join together forming the “Old Catholic” churches in a number of countries, including Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.  The following year they conferenced, even inviting some Protestants to be observers.  The Vatican responded with a Decree of the Inquisition in September of 1871, insisting the Old Catholics were No Catholics but this group enjoyed some state support in areas where they operated.  Excommunicated and without a Roman bishop to join them, they consecrated their own.  Like the SSPX of today, this was a step too far and Pius IX rejected them for denying his own infallibility and the Church’s indefectibility.  The Polish National Catholic Church came to North America in 1897 and the movement picked up the Church of Utrecht, which had broken with Rome over papal authority in the a couple of hundred years before.  There are now some quarter of a million claimed in the US and the insist that they are the real Catholics and Rome lost its way.  Things have not gone well for the Old Catholics, some ordaining women, some practicing open communion, and some breaking away over these and other issues.

Odd, in a sense, because Lutherans probably have had a decent claim to the term Old Catholics as much as these groups.  Interesting enough, our issue with Rome was only partly due to the papacy -- especially since the infallibility doctrine was to wait more than three hundred years to define.  The claim, however, was the same.  Rome had innovated and the Lutherans were attempting to preserve the ancient faith true to the Scriptures.  The councils had conflicted with each other and even contradicted each other.  The popes had erred.  Moral problems abounded and some related to the discipline of celibacy forced upon those who would be priests.  The problem was not simply language but a break down of catechesis which fostered errors and superstition that masqueraded as piety.  The Mass had become less gift to the Church and means to the faithful to receive the flesh and blood that forgave and cleansed the sins of the faithful than its own form of solemn entertainment, watched without really being part of it.  Luther was bold and his language colorful and his cause encouraged by the advent of the printing press but the Confessions of Lutherans were more churchly and nuanced, especially the Augustana and the Apology.  Luther shone best in his preaching and his catechisms as well as his exegetical work.  But in the end, Lutherans have been their own worst enemies.

Much of Lutheranism has become a sham of progressivism which long ago forsook the Scriptures as the one eternal truth to judge all truths and molded the Confessions into principles which could be used to justify the embrace of modernity.  Divisions were healed and then created anew, trying to sort out the authentic voice of the Augsburg Confession.  Some forgot that liturgical identity and confessional vitality were two sides of the same coin and sought to make doctrine distinct from and unrelated to the things of worship.  Some made their peace with Rome over justification and chose words which both could claim instead of something more clear and specific with integrity over the real causes of the Reformation.  Some, like Missouri, continue to lay claim to being the real voice of the Lutheran movement against the wannabes who find more in common with Methodists and Presbyterians than the LCMS.  Meanwhile, Rome seems to have institutionalized the papacy so well that even an oddball like Francis must be affirmed and his seemingly more careful successor is left to dance around the former's errors rather than simply admit them.  Old Catholics were right to suggest that the papal centrism of Vatican I was the problem as revealed by the way the Paul VI could bypass what Vatican II said to invent a new Mass nobody liked except those who were uncomfortable in their Roman shoes.  Now we have a pope who has to choose German bishops preapproved by those who contradict Roman teaching, submit to the secular rule of the Chinese government to get bishops there, and put up with the lavender mafia still clamoring for a new morality as jarring as was the new Mass nearly sixty years ago.  Sad to say that little Missouri may still be the best candidate for the claim Old Catholic and other Lutherans and Rome seem to be edging toward becoming no Catholic at all.  It is, after all, the reason why so many remain within Missouri's sometimes uncomfortable borders.  I guess it applies to me, as well.  I am not ready to trade one set of problems I know for the ones I am only beginning to discover.  Anglicanism wanted to be the via media but Lutherans wanted, and real Lutherans still want, to hold to the catholic doctrine and practice that is the mark of the faithful communion.  

Technology makes sin safe. . .

There was a time when the choice to have a child was the default and it was the exception to choose otherwise.  Of course, we all know that this has been reversed.  The default has become not to have children and the exception to have children.  While this is surely due to the values which have changed and the desire on the part of people, it is not solely due to these.  Key to this is access to cheap, reliable, readily available, and relatively safe means to accomplish this birth control and rid the mother of a child she does not want.  We should not minimize the effect of the technology upon everything.  

There are countless examples of technology serving to influence and even define the boundaries of right and wrong and the limits of acceptable behavior.  Indeed, that is one of the unintended consequences of technology -- it sometimes establishes norms even without the discussion or even consent of people.  That is especially true of matters of sex and gender.  If it were more difficult to prevent pregnancy or that imposed a difficult burden upon the couple or it was costly to obtain, birth control would surely be less prevalent than it is today.  If it were more difficult to end a pregnancy and there was no pill available to cast the unwanted child from the womb, the numbers of abortions would be smaller.  Technology has decided this for us and most folks follow along like mindless sheep to the slaughter.

What I fear is that technology is leading us to go too quickly where we have not even decided to go.  I can well recall when the mantra of those opposed to abortion chanted safe, legal, and rare.  We do not seem to be that concerned about the last part of that slogan.  Indeed, we seem not to even care how many children are killed in the womb so long as it is cheap, reliable, readily available, and relatively safe to end the life of the unborn.  When technology gets ahead of our reasonable deliberation on such things, we tend to end up where we had not planned to go.  When, in 1930, the Anglican Communion opened the door to birth control, who would have foreseen that within one hundred years marriage would become a more optional choice for people and children even less optional?  Who could have foreseen that whole sections of the civilized world would literally be in population decline as the birth rate declined to a rate in which we are not even replacing ourselves but shrinking?

The wisdom of St. Paul ought to prevail.  Things possible are not necessarily beneficial.  As I have spoken of before, the sexual revolution left our primary institutions in shatters with home and family trying desperately to keep up but lacking behind.  Liberty became its own end and was no longer tied to the desire to live freely responsible and upright lives.  We learned simply to live and to live primarily for ourselves.  Maybe it is time to reconsider the regularity of birth control and the normalcy of abortion.  Maybe now is the time for the Church to teach the faithful and those on the fringes of the church's life that what became normal to us (non-married and largely childless lives for those who are married).  Maybe it is time to admit that we were not ourselves and spoke in haste, enamored as we were with the setting as well as the numbers of those who inhabit that setting.  Will we continue to simply follow the judgment of the moment in deciding what is good, right, and salutary, or will we learn to speak to our family the values that undergird the fabric of our lives?

In one sense I might be saying that technology can tell us something is right and, even though it is wrong, it remains an enticement to us simply because we like being told what we want is right.  That is certainly the problem inherent with the problem of marriage and children becoming optional while sexual relations outside of marriage with the normal expectation of preventing a pregnancy and the assurance that if it was not prevented, it could be easily, cheaply, and safely eliminated.  Technology can make us think that sin, at least sexual sins, are normal and safe.  That is Satan's lie in Eden repeated again and again and again.

Promoting beauty or creating conflict. . .

Most of what we do in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod as far as media is concerned (official and unofficial) seems to revolve around more parochial concerns than more generally toward those outside the faith.  Yes, I know that there are plenty whose appeal is beyond the LCMS and plenty of those who have both kinds of conflict.  What I am more concerned about is that we often create as much conflict as we report and muddy the waters as much as we clarify them.  In so doing, we miss the more important use of the media available to us and that is to speak of the sheer beauty and grace of who we are, what we confess, and how we live (both liturgically and vocationally).  That is a missed opportunity.

Think, for example, of the last round of the presidential voting in the LCMS and of the media that has either officially or unofficially promoted a position or a candidate in that election.  What do those outside the faith hear and see in this kind of content?  It may be thoroughly relevant to the issue at hand for us inside the LCMS but is it going to help them to know us or Christ through us?  That is probably not the case.  The best use of media is not to air our grievances but to promote our position.  I know that you can do both at the same time but too much of what we do (maybe me included) is stirring the pot more than offering the world a taste of the goodness we offer.

I have heard others speak about this in particular with respect to Rome.  Roman Catholics have a great deal of positive media presence.  It is remarkable how easily they speak with deference and honor to their church, of the beauty and power of the liturgy, of the nearness of God's presence in the Mass, of the ordinary prayers common to most (the Rosary included), and of their unapologetic devotion to the practice of confession.  They seem to do this not because such things are the domain of Rome and its discipline but because they truly appreciate the beauty of their church and its life that encompasses their being and their identity as people.  Of course, as a Lutheran I cannot and do not always agree with the things they laud but I cannot help their admiration for they way they speak and of the positive nature of their witness.  These seemed to abide even through the tumultuous years of Francis.  I wish we knew how to be so positive in our display of our faith to the world.

One of the people who seems to do that so easily and powerfully is Pastor Will Weedon.  I have long promoted his visits with someone interested in Lutheranism and how positive that conversation was.  It remains, in my estimation, a high point of our social media presence -- even though it was done by someone outside our circle.  I have attached the videos here below for you to review if you have not seem them before or to watch again if you have.  This is how we need to speak to the world -- of the beauty of our confession, of our life together around the Word and Table of the Lord, of the catechism as prayerbook as well as explanation of the faith, and of our good works done not to impress anyone but because of Christ's good work to us upon the cross.  We can and should address the problems among us but we dare not forget to speak even more of this beauty and the profound character of God's life among us through the means of grace.  Beauty is not our enemy or even optional but intrinsic to our confession and our liturgical life.  In art and music, architecture and hymn, ceremony and rite, beauty is our ally and a medium for our message.  Why not online?

 

 

A conservative. . .

According to the dictionary,  conservative is an adjective meaning favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change or traditional or restrained or moderate; cautious.  The root of it all is that word conserve.  The problem is what to conserve.  The temptation is to pick one moment in history as either the starting point of the decline or the final moment of sanity.  But when?  When is that pristine moment which is the pure moment unspoiled by the advance of modernity or the corruption of values?  I know that conservatives would pick different dates just as I presume that liberals would be hard-pressed to agree on one date that defines their movement or their perspective.  For them it would seem the moment is still coming while for the conservative it remains somewhere in the past.

That is the problem in liturgical scholarship.  Some presume that the goal of liturgical scholarship is to find that pristine liturgy, that perfect and simple root without the flowering of modernity which has become like a treasure hunt except that none of our maps actually agree.  Ancient history is not the arena in which we hunt for the perfect moment but the revelation one truth in a thousand different ways along a linear path.  There are better moments and worse moments but that which endures are the grounding principles that endure through changes.  The problem of the liturgical scholars who were behind much of what changed in the post-Vatican II Mass is that they were looking for a perfect moment in history, a simple and yet profound glimpse through history to the unspoiled liturgy.  Most liturgical folks in other churches joined in the search assuming that there was such a pristine liturgy to be found.  In the end it was merely an excuse for burdening the rest of us with the liturgical preferences of the few.  Conservative liturgical scholarship disagreed with the date chosen.  Is that all conservatism is?  Is it a calendar matter?  One group choose 75 AD and another 600 AD and another 1563?  Who is the true conservative?

That same problem happens in Lutheranism.  Some chose 1941 as the date that governs everything good, right, and salutary and others choose 1888 and still others some other date when the kirchenordnung was unspoiled.  Others presume that a modern form (1978 or 2006 or later) is a better preservation of the ancient form than any other.  Is that all conservatism is -- the choice of a different date than the liberal or progressive?  Or, is there a body of things that go with and perhaps govern that choice of date?  A conservative is not a reactionary but neither is he opposed to everything modern.  It is a matter of principle.  The principles govern the conservative.  He is not like the liberal who things all things new are better but neither is he a curmudgeon who insists that everything old was perfect.  Instead the conservative sifts the history letting principle define goodness and not a snapshot of a moment in time.

I lived with an outhouse and do not wish to exchange my master bath for a rickety wooden building over a hole in the ground.  No conservative does.  But a conservative uses principles to suggest that those with male reproductive organs belong in the same bathroom no matter what gender the person feels at the moment.  What governs is not a date in time but a principle that goes well beyond the level of plumbing that has been installed in the room. 

A preface for every occasion. . .

Lutherans have a dearth of proper prefaces within the Canon of the Mass.  We too quickly defer to a seasonal generic set of words, not bad but clearly missing those prefaces which would be appointed for particular days.  Let me give an example.

In the Roman sanctoral calendar there is a day for St. Elijah, the Prophet.  Now, of course, we do not have such a day on our Lutheran calendar but the comparison is not about which days made it and which did not (or which became merely commemorations).  It is about the riches of propers which are tuned to the day.  The Roman proper preface for St. Elijah is:

Right indeed it is and just, proper and for our welfare, that we should always and everywhere give thanks to you, holy Lord, almighty Father, eternal God; and that we should triumphantly praise, bless, and proclaim you on this solemn feast of blessed Elijah, your Prophet and our father: who, at your word, arose like fire, closed the sky, raised the dead, smote the tyrants, killed the impious, and laid the foundations of the monastic life; who, fed with bread and drink by the ministry of an angel, walked in the strength of that food as far as the holy mountain; who was carried off in a whirlwind of fire, to return as a herald of the second coming of Jesus Christ our Lord; through whom your majesty is praised by the Angels and the Archangels, by the Cherubim too and the Seraphim, who lift up their endless hymn, day by day, with one voice singing: 

Don't you just love how the preface itself is filled with the primary details of the life of Elijah in a poetic way which invites us to know him of whom the day is set apart to remember?  I do.  I miss the abundance of propers in our Lutheran orders and wish we had utilized more rather than less.  Less is more is not a good principle in just about anything, much less rites and texts.  Though our Lutheran inclination is to tend toward simpler rather than elaborate, I wish we had expanded rather than reduced such examples of liturgical riches. 

Making messes. . .

I will pick on Pope Francis because he is not here to argue with me.  I suspect, however, he would not argue.  He saw as his mission and purpose to make messes for the Lord.  In places and times when the need was for clarity, he was obtuse.  In places and times when the need was for bring people together, he seemed to delight in actually creating conflict.  In places and times when the need was for patience and deliberation, he seemed to act upon whim or impulse.  In places and times when the need was for holding to the faith once delivered, he seemed to press the edge of change and innovation in a way that actually undermined the tradition and dismissed it.  

Pope Francis actually left his successor many messes.  Some of them were people (Victor Fernández).  Some of them were moto proprios (Traditionis custodes or Fiducia Supplicans}.  Some of them were initiatives (governance of Rome or synodality).  I could go on.  I do not need to.  You get it.  He stirred the pot and then looked offended when somebody caught him with the spoon.  There are those in every organization and in the Church who like to do what Francis did -- make messes.  While it is easy to blame those who make the mess, that does nothing to clean it up.  Cleaning up is, after all, the goal.  It would be good if you were steward of the Church on any level that you leave to your successors not messes but things as clean and orderly as possible.  That is good on the parish level and it is good on every other level as well.

We find that in Lutheranism as well.  Rome is not the only one who has a few mess makers.  Our own LCMS seems to have enough folks who like to render obtuse what is clear, to focus uncertainty what is certain, and to simply irritate folks for the sake of watching how it all plays out.  I have no problem with conflict when it concerns that for which we dare not compromise or waver but I am deeply suspicious of salacious headlines and threats that masquerade as concerns.  Sometimes we need to call out those who simply delight in making messes and watching what happens.  It is simply not helpful when we spend the majority of our time trying to clean up the messes others have left to us.  It is wearisome to constantly be putting out fires or throwing oil on troubled waters.  We should all be working to prevent messes and where they exist to clean them up and to making sure that if we must create a mess it is for essential purpose and need.

I speak this largely to those entrusted with offices in the churches but I also commend this to those who hold no office except that of baptized child of God.  We live in an age in which the internet allows us to make known to the world things which could be handled with some discretion.  Hitting post is a delightful way to get rid of our frustration but at what cost?  I know that there are times when we cannot help but make a mess in the process of cleaning it up and yet too often it is in the judgment of some that it is more fun to explode things than to build them up.  That is my concern today.  It does not matter at what level you are or what job you hold, be faithful and work for and not simply against the Church by making a mess where there does not need to be one.  Plus, my mother's wisdom for those who used her kitchen applies -- if you make a mess, clean it up!   

Extending Eden to the wild world. . .

You learn new things all the time.  One of the things I learned a few months ago has to do with Eden, with the command of God to Adam and Eve, and how that is connected to our vocation as children of God.  When sin entered the world and Adam and Eve were forced to leave the Eden that God had created for them, it was not simply a consequence of their sin but a purpose and mission given to them,  To be fruitful and multiply was the call to participate within God's own creative activity.  It is not the burden which so much of the modern world complains about but the gift of a partnership with the God who alone is Lord of life and who generated all that is from nothing.  We are given the opportunity to work with Him, not in spite of Him or without Him but with Him, learning to delight in His will and purpose and His abundant goodness which undergirds the whole of creation.

There was, however, also the command to exercise dominion over the earth in the Lord's name.  This was not because God could not but an invitation to work with God.  It was gift and blessing for God to call us to work in Him to do what He has given us to do.  The world was no longer Eden but a wild place which needed to be tamed, if you will, and domesticated [another word which comes from dominion].  So by exercising dominion, Adam and Eve [and that includes Christians to this day] extend God's order into the wildness of the world, taming it not by raw power but by the proclamation of the Gospel of forgiveness and life stronger than death.  It is a profound gift and blessing for us to do this.  Part of the way we do this is to be fruitful and multiply.  Children are a gift, blessing, and heritage from the Lord.  By having those children and catechizing them into the knowledge of God and encouraging their faith by bringing them to the font and teaching them the Gospel, we are domesticating the world to be a domus or house of the Lord instead of the wild place resistant to and antagonist to God's gracious will and purpose.

To say that the Gospel is somehow new or connected to the New Testament alone is foolish.  God's goodness is not an idea but flesh and blood in Christ.  We do not honor His goodness simply with cerebral activity but also by the ordering of our lives together as husband to wife and wife to husband, parent to child and child to parent.  The wildness of the world should be something fairly obvious to us today and the radical nature of the traditional call to marriage and children and family should also be obvious to us.  This is not about forcing through legality or command but by the application of the love that forgives, restores, and sustains the people of God in their life together just as they have received this grace from God Himself.  Marriage has become a radical thing in our world today.  Having a child or many children is a scandal in a world which lives for self alone in the pursuit of pleasure/entertainment alone.  Fidelity in marriage and faithfulness even in sacrifice for the sake of spouse and child are not burdens we must bear but the glad burdens of love from the love we have learned in God and His merciful goodness toward us.

We are, by God's grace, extending Eden into the wild world around us.  By this, God is giving order to the chaos and meeting death with the power of the resurrection.  It is not simply coincidence that these connect in this way but, again, by His order and design.  This is our vocation as the people of God who have been given new life in baptismal water, called by the Spirit to faith and life in the new identity we have as the people of God, led by the Good Shepherd's voice in His Word, and fed and nourished at His table.  This is not simply for us only but for the sake of the world as well.  There is witness simply to going to Church, valuing and practicing the power of forgiveness, living not as a faint echo of the world's own righteousness but as a people planted within the wilderness as God's domus or house.  The Church is an outpost of this house of God in the wilderness, the instrument of God's kingdom in bringing those who were not into that house.

 See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. (Eph 5:15-17)

Luxury. . .

While it is tempting to consider luxury in terms of what you have, there is another way of looking at this thing.  Luxury is also in what you have not.  In the riches of a world where nearly everyone has a smart phone and lives, to one degree or another by the screen, luxury may well be turning off the phone and making dark the ever present screen and its light.  In a world replete with information and, indeed, on overload with the abundance of it all, could luxury be silencing the ever present push of what is new or what is happening a world away in order to curl up in a comfy chair with a good book?  In a life defined by the press to be entertained and the pursuit of the newest and latest entertainment, is might be that luxury is taking rest, ending the cycle of pleasure seeking if only for a little while. 

In this respect, the Sabbath of God's own creation was a tremendous gift and blessing.  It was the gift of luxury in a world demanding labor and tempting with distraction to the point of losing one's own soul.  God knew this even though we are still trying to figure it out.  He created six days for labor (even the labor in pursuit of happiness) and insisted that for one day, rest would be the focus.  It was then as it is now an extravagant gift of largess to release us not simply from work but from the ordinary pursuits that become their own labor.  Of course, we have disowned His gift and restored to the Sabbath the same burdens placed upon the rest of the week.  Even on this day of days we are still wondering "what are we going to do now?"

It has become popular.  Charlie Kirk argued for something like Sabbath keeping and rest in his book “Stop in the Name of God.” Even the noted spiritual authority President Trump has encouraged Americans to embrace a “national Sabbath” and invite “friends, families, and communities of all backgrounds” to step back from their devices for a day of gratitude and rest.  Perhaps the good President might well take his own advice and put down his tweeting fingers more often.  Were they serious?  I think so.  They do not have to be sage oracles of wisdom to figure out that too much is worse than too little when it comes to the things that cross the crowded paths of our lives.  For world in perpetual insomnia and dependent upon sleep aids, it would be logical that we need to rediscover the idea of rest and learn again to call it a gift of God and a luxurious one at that.

I read how many folks actually are turning to a flip phone so that it is for calls and not for everything else from business to entertainment.  The small screen and its larger cousins are as demanding upon us as they are blessing and we forget that they are to be ruled by us instead of ordering us and our lives.  This is also the meaning of Sabbath.  Ordering our lives deliberately and within the rhythm God created and created for us, in particular.  No one but an idiot would believe that we will go back to a legalized fast from business as was in the past but perhaps we should all learn to simply say no for a little while, anyway.

Some weeks ago when our internet had been down for a couple of days, I called for repair and was informed that the fixit guy would show up at 11am on a Sunday morning.   Since we had been suffering with its outage as well as paying for it all in the reliable bill for services, I welcomed his coming until, when that Sunday arrived, I suddenly felt the disconnect of having the internet restored on a day in which Christians focus upon the Lord, the day of His resurrection having granted us another version of a Sabbath, so to speak.  It was embarrassing that on this way when we were planning to do not much at all, we required a man to work so that we would no longer be unplugged from it all.  Ouch.  At least we did not miss Church!

Africa can teach us something. . .

There are times when we presume that our situation is unique to us today and that because we have such unique circumstances today, there is nothing that we can learn from the past.  This is not simply foolishness but wrong.  The world is not a constant string of new and unique circumstances and situations but often a constant refrain of what was and still is, what was once but has come back again.  We would do well to pay attention to and learn from how the Church dealt with the same challenges and issues we are now facing.

In my reading a while ago, I was pleased to come across this history of the the African Church, only to discover that it fermented into one of the most intellectually formidable areas of the early Church.  Indeed, it is said that had Christians casually walking its streets during the Apostolic age -- even in times of persecution throughout the empire.  Africa provided very fertile soil for early Christianity and gave birth and formation to some of the intellectual giants of our early history -- men like Tertullian and Cyprian.  Yet it did so amid a very cosmopolitan atmosphere which blended conflicting cultural influences that did not exist in other parts of Rome's influence. It was Africa which was home to Augustine, not only a profound figure in Africa but throughout the West.  Although he was bishop of Hippo, his shadow was cast well beyond that domain.  It was here that synods and councils enumerated the Western canon, where formative teaching on original sin, the relationship between the spiritual and temporal estates, monasticism (at least in the West), and moral theology.

By the time of Augustine, North Africa had become a vibrant and deeply Christian community.  With  hundreds of bishoprics and the site of many councils and synods, the Church in Africa was catholic and apostolic, rooted in tradition, and practiced a vibrant sacramental theology.  By the time of Augustine's death in 430, the Vandals created a climate that led many Christians to flee to Italy and southern Gaul.  But the history remains and it shines a light upon our current situation.  Although we have some differences in our society and culture, the Church has tended to decline in the midst of diversity and has not held its own in the public square nor has it flourished in the kind of cosmopolitan shape of modern society in the West.  Clearly, one of the keys might a difference among the leaders today.  Are our bishops, pastors, and members as clearly orthodox and vocal in their public witness as were those of Northern Africa in the earliest days of Christianity?  Can we learn something from the way they gave testimony to and demonstrated their Christian witness within a diverse and cosmopolitan setting which is common to nearly every urban area in the world today?

With the arrival of the Vandals and the beginning of the end of the shining moment of the African Church, we find how things can change with the force of power against Christians.  The Church certainly suffered but so did the rest of the culture and civilization when the conditions caused  Christians to flee.  Indeed, it was Tertullian who first raised the question that haunts us today, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”  To put it another way, what does culture have to do with the Church?  What is revealed is, of course, the fact that the Church and the culture around it are not insulated from each other and deeply entwined on several levels.  Yet at the same time, it also reveals what happens when the Church becomes captive to that culture and how the culture itself suffers with the absence of a vital Christian presence.

Christianity can never simply be reduced to culture.  We all know that on some level.  But what is the relationship between the Church and the world around the Church?  Christianity does not live in a vacuum but neither is the Church a sponge to absorb all that is around it.  When it did flourish, the African Church lived in a flourishing world and it provided a setting in which Christianity could develop, expand, and build upon its witness and draw people into the life of the Church.  When things fell down due to the invasion of the Vandals, the absence of the Christian voice, and the decline of the institutions of the community, it was not simply the Church that suffered.  In the end, those who remained among the Christian community could not preserve what was severely tested by the threats to the civilization and the Church itself suffered by abandoning its former place within the society.

Within the West, we find ourselves as Christians increasingly isolated and insulated, some by threat and force against us and some by our own surrender, choosing to embrace the values and culture more than to stand forth and stand out in testimony to the Biblical witness and in continuity with the catholic tradition.  What is clearly apparent is how the culture itself is suffering without the vibrant presence of a committed Christian community but what is not always apparent is how the Church suffers when we no longer carry forward the banner of Christ's death and resurrection and the yeast of His Gospel into the world around us with the same urgency and lively proclamation.  That is also something to be learned by the African lesson as well.   

What the revolution won. . .

Having grown up in the time of the sexual revolution and, having already made it through puberty when the freedom was being claimed, I should be one of its champions.  In reality, it is an embarrassment that I was part of the generation that pushed for the liberation of desire from love and commitment.  It has changed not only our vocabulary or the sense of appropriate sexual decorum but also transformed the most vaunted institutions which form the bedrock of society.  And for what?

Freud insisted that sex was at the heart of our identity and personality as people as well as the core and center of our lives together as a society of people and the shape of our culture.  When we began to dismantle them in the cause of freedom and to liberate people from the prison of mores and values deemed ancient and prudish, we did not realize that we would at the same time sanction the dismantling of all those essential human relationships and bonds the defined us as a society and a civilization of people.  That is, after all, what the sexual revolution ended up doing.  It turned overturned the established lifelong union of husband and wife within the primary purpose of procreation and replaced it with a mere recreational activity designed more for self-expression, self-fulfillment, and, in the end, pleasure.  

The shape of the bond between a man and a woman (and any other gender or desire bonded together) was made into a partnership of whose success or failure hinged primarily upon the fulfillment of the members and much of that fulfillment was measured by the sexual needs of those in the "relationship". The end result is that sex today is not about self-giving or any other kind of giving.  It is about taking what you want, what you desire, and what you deem to be right and good and it has turned the partner into merely a another who consents to be a part of it all.  Who has been liberated by rampant divorce, a slower marriage rate among all, the absence of children from love and marriage, the objectification of sex to the point where even scripted pornography takes a second place to artificial intelligence versions of it all?  Is there anyone who has not been touched by this or harmed by it all?  By removing love, commitment, and fertility from the sex act, the act itself was turned into something merely erotic and eventually only prurient.    

In once sense, this had already happened in Germany in the wake of the first great war.  Germany ended up as a nation whose morals had gladly been surrendered to the gods of pleasure and desire.  It did not last and it could not.  The Nazi's rose up to end the reign of terror that had weakened family, home, work, and faith.  In the end their own form of terror replaced both the liberty and what was a hallmark of German virtue prior to the rise of the Kaiser and his socialist replacement.  It has taken longer for the sexual revolution to take hold in America and yet its fruits are little different from that which happened in the pre-Hitler Germany of the 1920s and 1930s.  Now we have come to think it natural to define marriage as a local commitment between any two people who can meet each other's needs and children have become the exception rather than the rule.  Any form of desire is considered legitimate and the traditional domains of family and home have been painted with the brush of patriarchy and submission which no woman can stomach and no man dare expect.  So, instead, the people have made marriage itself into a temporary arrangement subject to the whims of pleasure and happiness defined almost exclusively in terms of the individual.  But are we really happy?  Are we happier than those who went before us?  I am afraid that we all know the answer to that question. 

 

Constant remodeling. . .

I am a fan of DIY projects and remodeling shows.  It amazes me to deconstruct a house that has been improved over the years until it is merely a hodgepodge of failed attempts to make better what was simply the character of the time or the house or its plan.  Sometimes you have to give up and let the house be what it is.  Not every home can be turned into a wall-less wonder of an open plan and not every detail is a character flaw to be replaced by modern simplicity.  Sometimes it just is a Victorian or Craftsman or Foursquare or whatever and either you make your peace with it or not.  And, sadly, sometimes it is a candidate to be simply torn down to be replaced by something better (though the construction methods and materials are not always an advance, to be sure).

Life is like that.  We live in an improvement era in which everything is being constantly remodeled.  I can barely put my phone down between updates and every time I most need my computer, it is downloading and installing one more idiot updates.  All to give me more emojis and security and bug fixes that do little to help -- at least as far as I can see.  We face the same problem and the same failed solutions with our humanity.  There is a profound utopian impulse common in modern culture which has decided that we can take what is old and make it new, improve upon what we deem to be bad, and fix what is wrong. While with a house it is merely a money pit with dubious results, with humanity there is the innate risk of improving out of us who we are and turning the things that we cannot change into the rabbit holes that distract us from what we can change.  

We have decided that suffering, vulnerability, illness, aging, and the current in vogue human failures are simply problems to be solved.  We have forgotten that sin has placed its mark upon our human condition and that this will not be a defect easily engineered or solved by medical options that kill.  We have lost, at least in our communal mind, the need for and relevance of religion and so we bristle at the idea we need anyone's help.  Of course, God is convenient to blame but not as redeemer or savior.  We will not breed our way out of these things nor will we engineer our DNA to prevent them from staining our image of perfection.  We will not self-improve ourselves out of suffering or frailty or moral dilemma.  Such is the lot of a human condition since the Fall. We must begin by admitting this before anything else can help us.  Repentance is not meant to satisfy a demanding God but to admit that God is our helper and His goodness is not optional for us but key to any hope we might have. 

It amazes me how often in the home improvement shows we are told about smart switches or screens as if these are what will make a house into a home.  It is typical of our penchant for technology to believe that every problem is a technical one and every solution is a technological one.  Even for us.  That is why artificial intelligence is so enticing for us.  If we are having problems with the remodel, maybe we can make a technology which can do for us what we cannot -- an artificial humanity to fix our real one.  How unsurprisingly the solution seems to be more leisure, more entertainment, and more pleasure.  If you cannot live forever, live the time you have well until you decide to check out of Hotel California.  But, if you will recall, you can check in; you just cannot check out, at least in the song.

A just social order is a lofty goal and a life without constraints of pain or disappointment is a common enough one but is that really what we need?  Indeed, the Christian Gospel insists that there is something more that cannot be measured in earthly standards, except perhaps in guilt and shame, not exactly in great quantity today.  Forgiveness and a clear conscience are not perfunctory steps toward a greater goal but the beating heart of Christian faith and life.  Peace with God comes before we have peace within and can make peace with our brother.  Rome keeps talking about human dignity, common good, and justice as a basis for social order.  Protestants keep talking about individual conscience, self-government, and the limits of political authority.  I wonder if both cases have pursued prosperity and, at least in comparison with the past, achieved that dream but at the cost of knowing who we are and why we are here and the divinely given orders of marriage, family, children, and home.  Have we remodeled out of our modern lives the very things that gift us with purpose?  That is what I fear.

Judgment. . .

I read a critique of Protestantism (in which the author would also surely criticize Lutheranism) as a blind alley of judgment which makes it impossible to know who is correct.  

After visiting churches, reading books, talking with pastors, praying, and studying Scripture, I realized that every proposed solution eventually brought me back to the same place. I had to decide which interpretation of Scripture made the most sense, determine which doctrines counted as essential, judge which pastor had interpreted Scripture correctly, and evaluate which scholar presented the strongest case. In the end, every road led back to my own judgment. . . Yet that was the very problem I set out to solve.

I get it.  Protestantism offers a dizzying array of choices and answers and perspectives.  Indeed, how can you know which is right and which is wrong.  It is a judgment.  Now, to be sure, Lutheranism is not exactly the same thing as the myriad of options under the banner of Protestantism.  We have a written confession and claims of catholicity that appeal to Scripture and to the church fathers.  But that is for another post.  In this case, the author is contrasting Rome and Protestantism.  It is presumed that he is saying the choice of Protestantism is left to individual judgment and the choice of Rome is not.  That, however, is a false statement.

The choice of church, Rome or Protestantism or Lutheranism, is always a judgment call.  It is not that any of them offers a way to bypass judgment on the claims made by any of them.  No, the problem is not to find a church which does not require you to come to some conclusion or judgment.  The problem remains by which criteria you judge.  Is it reason or Scripture or catholicity or the implicit authority claimed over years or a teaching magisterium or an office (pope)?  I would suggest that Rome loves to press the issue of authority as if it were a way to bypass judgment when the real issue facing any serious Christian is which church stands with Christ and the Scriptures.  It is not antiquity alone or tradition or office (papacy) but Scripture.  

The person was hoping for some sort of objective judgment to relieve him of the need to judge the claims along side the authority (Scripture).  There is not.  Not in Rome, not in Protestantism, and not in Lutheranism.  You cannot skip over the judgment but you had better judge according to the right criteria.  Rome forgets this.  But Lutheranism here is in a different position than Protestantism.  We have a book, a written confession, that does not equivocate.  Looking for a church?  Dig deep into Scripture and into the claims of all churches.  Lutheranism looks good  It is not that hard to look good in comparison to the many versions of Protestantism but Lutheranism looks good compared to Rome as well.