Wauwawhat? (Part Four)

I have a life besides that of a blogger—including that of parish pastor and adjunct professor. The latter really caught up with me this past month as I was forced to spend much time preparing to use a new textbook in my Latin class and had to let my blogging slide. Your patience is appreciated. Here are my long awaited comments on Köhler’s article.

Köhler’s article "Legalism Among Us" (originally titled "Gesetzlich Wesen unter uns") appeared in installments in 1914 and 1915 in the Theologische Quartalschrift and was translated and printed in The Wauwatosa Theology 2:229-282; the pagination in this blog will refer to the latter. Köhler makes four arguments: “Legalism among Christians consists in that they take the motives and forms of their actions from the law instead of letting them flow from the gospel” (p. 229). “This behavior manifests itself in the Lutheran church chiefly and principally in bravado of orthodoxy” (p. 229). “Where these factors gain the upper hand in every phase of ongoing church life and become a condition to the point of style, the decline sets in, evident externally when we adopt all kinds of unhealthy traits copied from the sectarian churches” (p. 230). The only antidote is repentance “brought about when again we search more deeply into the gospel and cling to it all the more incessantly” (p. 230).


Köhler is not arguing that the confessional Lutherans of his day were teaching a salvation by works. It is not that kind of a crass legalism, but rather a more subtle kind, one where the law rather than the gospel motivates Christian behavior. Köhler notes that this legalism appears in more than one form. Among the Reformed and the Pietists the legalism appears as a stress upon sanctification, but among Lutherans it often comes in the form of “bragging about orthodoxy” (p. 239). Köhler is not opposed to orthodox teaching, but he knows that the goal of orthodox teaching is not itself, but to preach faith in Christ (pp. 239-240). When orthodoxy becomes more of an intellectual exercise used to congratulate its adherents than to lead to a genuine life of repentance and faith, it makes people factious and more eager to dispute over words rather than facts (p. 239). The result is intellectualism, which turns “the words of Scripture, especially of the gospel, into a law for which one demands rational assent” (p. 241, emphasis in the original) and an unhealthy traditionalism that elevates an inherited system above the Scriptures. While the legalism of the Reformed usually leads to doctrinal indifferentism in that they stress godly living over doctrine, legalism among Lutherans tends toward sectarianism (p. 247).

He has much to say about the way that legalism was shaping late 19th and early 20th century Lutheranism that I cannot fully explore in this essay: on giving (p. 277), on administration (p. 269-279), and dialogue with other Christians (pp. 248-249, 279-281). But rather than summarize more of the essay, I would rather have you read it on your own so that I can devote the rest of this blog to considering its ongoing relevance.

Köhler keenly saw that people tend to fall into legalism in those matters that they are most concerned about. Those who stress godly living will be tempted to become legalistic about sanctification. Those who stress the pure teaching of God’s Word will be tempted to become legalistic about orthodoxy. There is nothing wrong with sanctification or orthodoxy. In fact, we should have more of both. But legalism introduces bravado rather than the substance. To underscore the bravado, those who are doing the boasting will have to do everything they can to distinguish themselves from the great unwashed. For those who stress sanctification, it will mean inventing all sorts of rules (e.g., no card playing). For those who stress orthodoxy, it will mean an unthinking traditionalism removed from the Scriptures. Ironically, though, legalists end up with less than they had hoped to gain. Sanctification-based legalists in the end are less sanctified; they don’t play cards, but they bicker and lack the other virtues. Orthodoxy-based legalists in the end are less orthodox; they don’t exactly teach false doctrine, but they know the Homiletisches Real-Lexikon better than they know the Scriptures and they use their knowledge to find fault with others rather than to teach the faith.

Köhler also noted how often the church lurches from one legalism to another without recovering the gospel. In effect that is what happened to the Missouri Synod in the middle of the twentieth century, as some of its theologians argued against its parochialism. If previously the synod had been legalistic about being orthodox, many became legalistic about being unorthodox. In fact, I know several pastors whose theological thinking goes no further than “I’m for whatever most undercuts traditional morality or articles of faith and will call anyone who differs from me a legalist.” Of course, that is a legalism all of its own—a blind unthinking anti-traditionalism that, unlike the legalism of orthodoxy, doesn’t even have the virtue of teaching God’s truth.

The clash between the orthodox and the anti-orthodox came to a head in the Missouri Synod in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Perhaps one reason that some of the issues still smolder a half century later is because we have not confronted the issue of legalism head on. There are still some people for whom sound doctrine is a giant game of “gotcha” rather than a reveling in the mercy and love of God as revealed in Scripture. And those people keep others from taking doctrine seriously. Perhaps as we work on the Koinonia Project to bring about a deeper unity in synod, we can all do what Köhler rightly recognized as the only antidote to legalism: digging deeply into the gospel and clinging to it for all its worth.

Wauwawhat? (Part Three)

The Wauwatosa theologians not only revived biblical studies among confessional Lutherans, they also warned of the forms legalism could take in Lutheran circles. I will devote my next blog (the final one in the series) to paying final tribute to J.P. Köhler by looking in detail at an article he wrote against legalism and commenting on its continued relevance. But in today's blog I will talk about legalism inside and outside of Wauwatosa. As Köhler stated so well, legalism consists of deriving the power of the Christian life from the law rather than the gospel. Although confessional Lutherans might seem to be immune to legalism because we believe that we are saved by trusting in Christ rather than by doing the works of the law, there is an insidious means by which legalism can creep back into the church: preserving sound doctrine (noble task though it is) substitutes for believing it; in other words, we are tempted to become proud of our work of preserving orthodoxy rather than cherish the teaching God has given us. Moreover, Köhler argues, we can easily fall into legalism by overemphasizing a particular structure or style of organization for the church or by preaching a sanctification empowered by the law rather than the gospel.


Köhler’s words spoke to a confessional Lutheranism of the early 20th century that was often orthodox but had lost its first love (Rev. 2:4). Orthodoxy had become a game of “gotcha” rather than a reveling in the truth that our merciful God had revealed to us. There was also a rather dour attitude towards life in general that revealed itself in all sorts of prohibitions from going to the movies to installing lightning rods on barns. “For them, life was meant to be endured,” quipped one person about people of that generation. The joy of the gospel wasn’t there.

Köhler’s words were welcome, but unfortunately the Wauwatosa theology was not able to escape a legalism of its own. Köhler’s words in “Legalism among Us” are a candid but loving admonition to the Wisconsin and Missouri Synods. However, there was a torrent in Wisconsin of the 1920’s of what can only be called legalistic anti-legalistic writings, as writer after writer (from the renowned exegete August Pieper to elementary school teachers) wrote scathing denunciations of the Wisconsin Synod. The Synod had wanted merely to see the prisoners in the Bastille set free, but it got Jacobin terror instead.

Three incidents in particular stand out. Two school teachers denounced their pastor as a false prophet for not condemning what they considered vices. A college faculty and its governing board disagreed over the proper discipline for a couple dozen students. A parish pastor wrote a ham-handed attack on life in the Wisconsin Synod, complaining about everything from confirmation instruction to synod structure. In each instance the advocates of Wauwatosa were on the more rigorist side of the question and operated with little charity towards their opponents.

As a result the era of the Wauwatosa theology came to a formal end. Köhler left the presidency of the seminary in 1930 (and the Wisconsin Synod in 1933) and lived somewhat reclusively for his last twenty years. A handful of congregations left the Wisconsin Synod to form the Protes’tant Conference, unusually punctuated in more than one sense. That conference publishes the journal Faith-Life, which tends to have insightful articles by Köhler, less than useful (and perhaps less than truthful) encomiums to Köhler’s great musical and artistic abilities, and scathing denunciations involving personalities and events long forgotten. When I went through a stack of Faith-Life issues about twenty years, one article in particular stuck in my mind. It described how Köhler had criticized August Pieper out of the blue by saying at a dinner, “Pieper, du bist Pommer!” (“Pieper, you are a Pomeranian!”) This had taken place long before Pieper and Köhler parted company. Now one cannot read very much of Faith-Life without realizing that its writers deem August Pieper to be the Darth Vader of the Wisconsin Synod—the formerly noble knight who went over to the dark side. But there was no explanation as to why Köhler had made the remark, what it meant, and whether it was justified. If the reader didn’t instantly understand and assent, it was proof positive that the reader was hopelessly in error.

This is a negative legacy left by the Wauwatosa theologians, one that mars an otherwise positive inheritance. I would urge that the experience teaches us that those who rail against a particular form of legalism should be wary lest they fall into another form of that same vice.

Wauwawhat? (Part Two)

In my last post I noted that I sympathize with the goals of the Wauwatosa school. It sought to restore the primacy of exegesis even when doing systematic theology. It did not so much seek to overturn the conclusions of Missouri’s systematic theology as to add depth to it by making sure that it was not making use of a facile interpretation of a biblical passage but that it fully understood the context. But even as I praise it, I must say that to some degree that its more recent advocates have done injustice to the state of affairs in which Wauwatosa developed. Ironically I find myself having less trouble with the Wauwatosa theology itself than some of its would-be heirs, just as those of the Wauwatosa school objected less to the 19th century C.F.W. Walther than to his heirs in the early 20th century.


Most discussions of the Wauwatosa theology fail to consider the whole context of education in the early twentieth century. For one thing, the history given in the first volume of Northwestern Publishing House’s collected works of the Wauwatosa school is a little misleading. It correctly chronicles how much time the seminarians at the Missouri Synod’s Saint Louis seminary devoted to mastering the Latin of the Baier-Walther Compendium, but it fails to recognize that most Missouri Synod pastors were not trained there in the synod’s first sixty years or so, but at its practical seminary (which migrated from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Saint Louis to Springfield, Illinois, and would eventually return to Fort Wayne) and its pre-seminary partner schools in Germany. It was only in the early twentieth century that the synod thought it might be better if more of its ministers were given the highly academic training of Saint Louis than the more practical training of Springfield. To accomplish that, though, the Missouri Synod realized that it would have to drop some of its practices (such as the heavy use of Latin in the classroom) that proved too big of an obstacle to all but the best students.

And thus it is easier to understand the reason that the Wauwatosa school declined to copy Missouri’s model of education in its entirety. While the Missouri Synod still retained a more practical route of training for its ministers, the Wisconsin had only one option: six years of Gymnasium (the equivalent of a boarding high school and junior college) followed by seminary. Thus, it made little sense to foster a seminary curriculum that even the larger Missouri Synod found too impractical for most of its pastors and was revising even for its more academically minded students. And yet the histories gloss over this reason for why the Wauwatosa seminary developed the way it did.

In addition, the histories of the Wauwatosa theology seem blissfully ignorant of the larger picture of educational trends in the late nineteenth century. A mere state away from Wauwatosa was Augsburg College, which under the tutelage of Georg Sverdrup and the Lutheran Free Church sought both a more exegetical approach to theology and a broader cultural education than the traditional model provided, enamored as it was with Greco-Roman antiquity. And yet the late Leigh Jordahl in his doctoral dissertation argues that Wauwatosa was one of a kind in breaking from the Latin theological model. (Jordahl, trained in Norwegian-American circles, ought to have known better.) On a more global scale there was an intense debate on the direction education should go. Was academic specialization to be preferred to the teaching of a common curriculum? Should education be founded on practical truth rather than abstract theory? Indeed, was anything that was not in some way practical untrue? Was it possible to speed up learning by presenting abstractions (e.g., by giving entire paradigms of grammatical forms at once) rather than by having students learn more intuitively?

None of this lessens the value of the Wauwatosa theology. But it seems ironic that those who love Wauwatosa’s emphasis on understanding historical context seem to have overlooked some of the historical context of Wauwatosa.

Wauwawhat? (Part One)

In my next couple of blogs I will be writing about “the Wauwatosa theology.” It gets into some arcane history, but some of that history gets into more recent events in confessional Lutheranism. Even though I belong to the Missouri Synod (ca. 2.4 million members) instead of the Wisconsin Synod (ca. 390,000 members) where the Wauwatosa theology was centered, I cannot entirely ignore it because the Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Synod were in fellowship with each other at the time and it had an effect on both denominations.


But what is the Wauwatosa theology? It refers to the emphases found in the Wisconsin Synod of approximately the 1910’s and 1920’s when that synod had its seminary in Wauwatosa and was under the leadership of J.P. Köhler. Although August Pieper and Johannes Schaller (and sometimes Hermann Meyer and Adolf Hönecke) are often mentioned as fellow Wauwatosa theologians, it was Köhler who was the driving force behind the movement. Although it would be incorrect to speak of a Wauwatosa theology as soon as he began teaching at the seminary in 1900, it was certainly well in place when he took over the presidency in 1920. The movement came to a formal end with the seminary’s move in 1929 and the end of Köhler’s presidency in 1930, although most in the Wisconsin Synod would say that its legacy remains.

At the heart of the Wauwatosa theology was a re-emphasis on exegetical theology (which explains the Scriptures verse by verse) and to a lesser extent historical theology (which is concerned with the history of the church and theology). This emphasis stood in distinction to the Missouri Synod at the time, which spent more time on systematic theology (which explains the teachings of the Scripture topic by topic) and practical theology (which teaches pastors how to apply doctrine in their parish life through preaching, teaching, pastoral care, and the like). In addition, the Wauwatosa movement criticized the Missouri Synod for its educational system that placed a premium on doing theology in Latin. This was due to the fact that nearly every systematic theology had been written in Latin until the nineteenth century and the early Missouri Synod found little to commend in the contemporary systematic theologies being published in German or English. Because many students were too busy struggling with the Latin in the Baier-Walther Compendium, the main systematics textbook, they had no time to devote to verse by verse exegesis of the Scripture.

Even before the Wauwatosa theology made its appearance, the Missouri Synod had realized that there was a problem and was correcting it. C.F.W. Walther (who is sometimes caricatured by historians of the Wauwatosa school as hostile to serious exegesis or at least uninterested in it) finagled a call to Georg Stöckhardt to teach exegetical theology at his seminary; indeed, Walther was far more eager than just about anyone to see more exegesis taught at his seminary. Köhler and his colleagues readily acknowledged their deep debt to Stöckhardt and to Walther, but some more recent chroniclers of the Wauwatosa movement are less willing to do so. Moreover, about the same time that the Wauwatosa school was forming, Franz Pieper wrote a systematic theology in German so that his students wouldn’t have to struggle with Latin theological texts any more, thus freeing up more time for other studies. (A generation later seminarians found the German as difficult as their forebears had found the Latin, and Pieper’s work was translated into English.) More exegetical courses were added with the result that today the total number of required exegetical courses in Missouri’s schools outnumbers the systematic ones and is close to that required by the Wisconsin Synod. The transition was also furthered along by a change in Missouri’s environment. In its first half century or so the synod was growing so quickly that the best form of education seemed to be to cover all the major theological topics as well as possible and to offer advice on how to preach them and then to let the seminarian read the Bible carefully verse by verse on his own once he was out in the parish. But now the synod was beginning to realize the value of a more rounded theological education.

I tend to think of myself as more of an exegete than a systematician, but systematics has been a close second love. It is not surprising then that I find much to commend in the Wauwatosa theology. I recommend the three volume collection of the Wauwatosa theology published by Northwestern Publishing House, the first of which has a quite detailed history of the movement. I also recommend John Schaller’s Biblical Christology as a fine example of systematic theology done with an exegetical bent. At the same time, though, I find that there are areas of that school that bear further investigation and perhaps even critique.

All That Jazz

Has anyone else noticed that whenever a jewelry store or high end furniture gallery runs an ad on the radio, there is always upbeat jazz playing in the background? It’s never quite as laid back as Kenny G, but there is never any scatting either. It tends to feature saxophone or guitar solos rather than trumpet ones. It never has any of the edginess of ragtime or Latin jazz, but is more of a distilled form of the genre without lapsing into muzak.


It makes perfect sense. What other type of music would you expect to be played? Pop rock is the music of the hoi polloi. Indie rock might show that you have some taste, but also probably indicates that you have no money; it would be the perfect music for a futon store ad, if futon stores actually advertized. Country music appeals to people who care more about the bed of their pickup truck than the bed in their house. The usual classical music favored in advertisement—things like a Mozart concerto—might appeal to a well-educated and wealthier crowd, but it also conveys the notion of being stuffy. And that leaves a more urbane form of jazz. It says that you are the kind of person who came from a family that took music seriously. You learned to play the piano, but you didn’t stay stuck in the eighteenth century. You sneaked out to go to those small clubs featuring musicians that 99% of the population had never heard of. You love flattened fifths and swung notes and other things that “break the rules.” You’re a bit naughty, but in a nice way; no one ever gets hurt. You’re sophisticated and enjoy the finer things in life, but you don’t want to drive Daddy’s car or have his couch from his suburban McMansion in your trendy city loft. And the advertisers are saying, “We’re just as sophisticated. Come on in and you’ll see a selection that is all you.”

Interestingly enough, though, the musical choice seems to work even with people who didn’t grow up in Kenilworth, spending their misspent youth on sneaking into the city to go to the Green Mill. (That certainly isn’t my background.) The important thing is that when you decide to buy that engagement ring or splurge on that really nice sofa, you go to a place run by people who have the sophistication that you feel you may lack. As long as you have the sense that they are honest people, you want someone who will steer you into making the right choice—and make you look more debonair than you really are.

This has application to life in the church. There is nothing inherently wrong with any genre of music for its use in the church, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with a furniture showroom using any kind of music it wants. But because music has cultural associations—associations, by the way, that change over time—one has to be thoughtful about the sort of music used in the church. The music should convey that the church is ancient, not archaic; modern, not ephemeral; holy, not sanctimonious; amid a particular culture, not of it; and a lover of beauty, not hedonistic. That’s a tall order, but an important one.

Change and the Church

It is an article of faith in many sectors of Christianity that everyone must be for every change in the church, no matter what it might be. “Change or die” is their motto, and there is some truth to that adage. Companies determined only to sell buggy whips have gone out of business. But there is a corresponding truth that is often overlooked: if you change, you will die. Many companies have tried tinkering with the formula that had brought them success and were quickly driven into bankruptcy. Change can breathe new life into a dying organization, but it can also kill off a healthy one. Healthy babies must change by constantly growing and maturing. Healthy adults, however, often have to resist changes, such as cancer and the deterioration of the body.


Change in and of itself, therefore, shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of the church—or a company or organization or government. We shouldn’t tell pastors that their one calling in life is to be a visionary leader of change. And we certainly shouldn’t tell pastors that their Sunday sermons are supposed to be all about keeping in front of their congregation’s eyes the organizational changes they desire. (A few years ago I was actually told by an expert in my denomination that this should be the focus of my preaching rather than the Scriptures!) We shouldn’t condition congregations to embrace every proposed change unthinkingly. And that means we need to stop joking about people who are resistant to change, as if they are all troglodytes who think that the wheel will spell the downfall of civilization.

Instead we should have a more nuanced approach. When a body is growing, there are certain constants (e.g., the DNA is always the same, as is the overall structure), even as there are certain changes being made (e.g., in height and weight). Even when a body has reached maturity and is not growing any more, little changes are constantly occurring, as when one cell dies and another replaces it. And thus we should expect that life in the church (as well as in society at large) will balance change and constancy. Constancy won’t be sclerosis, and change won’t be artificial. There will be an organic development, one where the change confirms and builds upon the substance.

In order to do that, churches and pastors must cultivate a climate that welcomes both new ideas and constructive criticism of them. Everyone must understand that God has placed in the church people with different attitudes toward change. Some will automatically be for it, others against it, and many in the middle who (like myself) embrace some changes while eschewing others. Rather than write off the other groups as unrepentant degenerates (as many church leaders have treated those less than eager for every change), the church ought to welcome all these voices. Those who embrace change without a second thought need to listen to those who oppose it. They must also give them time to formulate their ideas because often opponents can sense a negative result of a proposed change before they can articulate it. At the same time, opponents of change must be willing to consider whether or not they are against a particular idea simply because they don’t want to be bothered with something new.

This process should also help people to see that a change need not be merely an either/or proposition. Sometimes the question is not whether a change should be made, but when, and that point gets lost in the debate. To use an example from my personal life, I often welcome the announcement of new technologies, but I am also rarely the first to buy them, mainly because they are pricy and full of bugs when they first come out. I wait to buy them until they have gone mainstream. By the same token, a church that chooses to adopt something that is rather unusual will often have to pay an extra cost and deal with many unforeseen problems, while another church that adopts the same general ideas a decade later may do so with fewer difficulties.

All change isn’t of God—or of the devil. Therefore, we need a spirit of discernment in order to make wise choices.

Mystery or Science Fiction?

When I was in graduate school, one of my classmates asked, “Mystery or science fiction?” He went on to explain, “That is the raging debate that divides classicists. Either you read mystery novels for fun or you read science fiction.” Up to that time I had thought that the great divide in that profession was between the Hellenists and the Latinists, that is, between those who preferred to read and teach ancient Greek and those who preferred Latin. I had known nothing of this other debate.


At the time I straddled the divide. I had read mystery novels voraciously ever since I was a child and still do. I especially love mysteries that double as historical novels, such as those featuring Brother Cadfael (written by Ellis Peters) and Gordianus the Finder (written by Steven Saylor). For years I wouldn’t miss Mystery! when it was running on PBS on Thursday nights. But I also loved science fiction, cutting my teeth on Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. I grew up watching Star Trek and similar shows. Often I loved science fiction more for its cheesiness, and it was a guilty pleasure, much like scarfing down a bag of potato chips. But since then my love for science fiction has waned a bit, mainly because of the unevenness of the genre. While there are many great works like Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, there are also hundreds of books where the writing is puerile and the thoughts more so. Although mysteries also vary in quality, even the most pedestrian cozy mystery usually has its redeeming characteristics. The same cannot be said of science fiction. Nonetheless, I still enjoy watching some science fiction movies, sometimes for its cinematic value (e.g., Blade Runner and Dark City) and sometimes because of its compelling tale or moral (e.g., Gattaca, Brazil, and Minority Report), although I now do substantially less reading in the genre. Thus, if I had to answer the question today, I would lean to the mystery side of the divide.

But why would this be a hot topic for classicists when neither genre existed in the ancient world? I have never heard anyone give an answer, but I think that the genre of pleasure reading indicates how a scholar approaches antiquity. In a mystery the central character is lifeless and cannot directly help in the investigation. Instead, the corpse is dissected and clues ferreted out from other sources in order to find the killer. Science fiction, however, portrays not only people who are well and alive, but also an entire living civilization that is perhaps as essential a character as any of the individuals who appear in the book. Thus, it would seem that mystery lovers would approach antiquity as a dead civilization, whose language must be parsed and whose social history carefully pieced together from various authors, while science fiction fans would seem more interested in recreating a living civilization. So far the advantage would seem to lie with the science fiction crowd. But mysteries often do a better job at portraying how people interact with each other, perhaps because the crime can be solved only when one has a full understanding of those dynamics. And, thus, mysteries may feature a death prominently but they ironically may also seem more alive than works of science fiction do. That is doubly true when the work of science fiction creates an alien world mainly to serve as a foil for present day society. Such worlds are as dull and lifeless as the thinly veiled screeds that they are.

Science fiction also tends to be either utopian or dystopian, while mysteries tend to reveal a much more nuanced world. St. Mary Mead may seem somewhat idyllic at first glance, but Agatha Christie is no Edward Bellamy; her Miss Jane Marple knows very well where all the bodies are buried. By the same token, even the hardboiled detectives seem less cynical about their worlds than do authors of dystopian science fiction. Moreover, while science fiction tends to focus on technology as either the problem or the solution, mysteries offer a broader explanation for humanity’s failings.

Both genres will doubtlessly be with us for many more years, and the excellent quality of some works in each genre will win the grudging respect of fans of the other. But it is useful, nonetheless, to consider what our favorite genre of books and movies tells others about us.

The picture in this post is in the public domain because the copyright has lapsed.

Faith of their Fathers

On Monday I finished reading Thomas Maier’s The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings, a fascinating and sympathetic journey through five generations of that family’s life in America. Maier’s thesis is that biographers and historians have tended to underestimate the influence of the Kennedys’ Roman Catholicism and Irish ethnicity on their politics, mainly because none of the Kennedys set up the theocracy feared by (among others) the Houston ministers during the 1960 presidential campaign. But Maier argues that Jack and Robert Kennedy staunchly opposed communism primarily because they had been shaped by a conservative Catholicism that saw communism as its primary enemy. Moreover, Robert Kennedy fought hard for civil rights both because Catholic theologians had been teaching that integration was the morally correct choice and because he saw the treatment of African-Americans through the lens of his own Irish experience.


Maier’s thesis is essentially correct. One cannot totally divorce someone’s political ideas from the experiences (whether sacred or secular) that shaped him or her. Maier has an easier time drawing a line from the Kennedys’ Irish immigrant experience to their politics since for a Kennedy being an Irish-American meant knowing oppression first by the English and then by the Boston Brahmins. The Irish in the Kennedys compelled them to beat the Brahmins whether in finance (as Joe Kennedy did) or in building a new political base (as Joe’s father PJ and father-in-law John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald did). But what did it mean to a Kennedy to be a Roman Catholic?

It helps to understand that Roman Catholicism is not a monolithic religion—something that Protestants too often fail to grasp. There are people like the late Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman, fighting Vatican II tooth and nail and supporting an almost reactionary political mindset, as well as those like the late Richard Cardinal Cushing and the Jesuit Fr. Richard McSorley, who welcomed the church’s aggiornamento and thought that the church’s creeds pushed for a progressive answer to the social and political questions of the day. (All three clerics were well known to the Kennedy family.) Thus, it is not surprising to see a wide variety of responses, even from equally pious members of the family. Indeed, as Maier points out, there were shifts in the way that Robert Kennedy (one of the most devout of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s children) dealt with clergy and with his attitudes towards certain political questions.

At the same time, though, Maier points out that there were certain constants amid the changes. For example, Robert Kennedy firmly believed in original sin, unlike most of his more secular liberal allies. Though Maier does not say so, I would argue that it added gravitas to Robert’s agenda and kept him from the utopianism so prevalent among the political left. And thus, though I am not a Roman Catholic, I appreciate the way that his faith added depth to what could have been a very flat way of looking at politics.

Most commentators on faith and politics assume that a politician of faith must either be a diehard secularist in political life or an outright theocrat. Maier shows us another possibility: people’s faith shapes their values, which will determine to some degree the political questions they find most interesting and the approaches they will use to answer those questions, even if their faith does not explicitly determine their politics and they use secular arguments in the political realm and find themselves often allied on political matters with those of a completely different faith.

Source Criticism

Before a historian explains the implications of a particular historical event, he or she must first determine what happened. But to do that, a historian must know how to handle the sources; indeed, that is the sine qua non of the historian’s craft. Unfortunately, Tom Mockaitis, a history professor at DePaul University, failed to do this before writing his editorial in yesterday’s edition of the Chicago Tribune.

I do not fault Professor Mockaitis for failing to examine the primary sources that would describe Anders Behring Breivik’s motivation for his murderous rampage. Neither the professor nor I have any time to look carefully at the madman’s manifesto, and I am sure that Professor Mockaitis is no more tempted to slog his way through that sewage than I am. But, of course, there are people who have done so, and it is to them that we should turn. The question arises: what secondary source should we consult?


Professor Mockaitis chose to latch onto a statement made shortly after Breivik’s arrest, in which the deputy Oslo police chief Roger Andresen characterized his prisoner as “a right-wing Christian fundamentalist.” At the same time, the professor chose to ignore an article written by Arne Fjeldstad, a theologian and religion column writer for Aftenposten—Norway’s New York Times—in which he demonstrates how little theology of any kind holds sway in Breivik’s thought and how Breivik disavows that he is personally Christian. Now the term “fundamentalist” has been stretched to mean many things over the years, but if words have any meaning at all, a fundamentalist should take religion more seriously than his average compatriot and his religion ought to shape his thoughts and actions in a major way. By this definition, Breivik cannot be a fundamentalist; indeed, those who think that a religion has no intrinsic merit, care little for the particulars of its creed, and view religion as a placeholder for society’s cultural values are generally called religious “liberals,” not "fundamentalists."

But should we believe Andresen or Fjeldstad? Andresen was acting as a spokesman for the Oslo police department and had not necessarily interviewed Breivik himself. Moreover, the announcement was made shortly after Breivik’s arrest, mainly to squelch the many rumors that the terrorist was a Muslim. (I noticed how quickly the announcement appeared after the arrest, as I was carefully following the news all day on the online versions of Dagbladet and Aftenposten, Oslo’s two main newspapers.) Thus, a police spokesman, with perhaps little firsthand knowledge of the suspect and without the academic training to tell the Trinity from a truncheon, gave a press statement mainly to calm down Norwegian anti-Muslim sentiment. Meanwhile, Fjeldstad, an expert on religion, actually waded into the sewage of Breivik’s 1500 page manifesto in order to see what religious or political thoughts lay behind the attack. Whose evaluation should we believe?

Professor Mockaitis is correct to say that Christians have not been immune to using violence in the name of their faith. But that is not what happened a week ago in Oslo. Relying on poor evidence, the professor has drawn the wrong conclusion and overlooked the real lesson to be learned. He thinks that Breivik’s attack should teach us to be wary of people who are overly religious. In truth, it should teach us to be wary of people who aren’t particularly religious, but may invoke religion now and then to support the secular ideology they really believe in.

Just Because It's Hot in DC, You Don't Have to Get into a Heated Argument Here

Just the other day I got a copy of the latest Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly. I can see your eyes glazing over already, as you think that it is a collection of dusty memoirs of prairie pastors from a century and a half ago. It can be that at times, to be sure, but often it has nuggets of wisdom with direct application to today.

Such was the case of an article entitled “The Christian and Politics,” pages 119-121 of volume/issue 84:2. I thought that the advice of Theodore Brohm (1808-1881), translated by Sieghart Rein, to be particularly useful to us today. Here are some highlights drawn from Brohm’s ten theses:


• “All political questions, as far as they are purely of a political kind, are to be strictly excluded from pulpit and congregational meetings [voters’ assemblies].”
• “To command agreement in matters concerning eternal life is no overstretched demand…because God has given us the source and norm of the truth [i.e., the Word]…but to demand complete unity in the things which God has subjected to the judgment of human reason without revealing His will in Holy Scripture, would be presumptuousness and would lead to intolerable tyranny.”
• “Diversity of political opinions…can exist, irrespective of unity of the spirit and faith, just as well, as diversity in the opinions about matters of art, civil association, the best manner of farming, etc.”
• “Love does not judge others because of a different opinion, does not despise them, does not undertake to push its personal conviction upon others with impropriety, much less does it want to exert control over him, or have everything arranged according to its mind. Love…readily believes the best of [an opponent], even when it deems to have him trapped in a great and harmful political fallacy.”
• “If renowned grayed men, of whom one can deny neither ability nor integrity, are of different opinions concerning significant political questions, thus it is indeed an intolerable assumption to conduct oneself, talk and act as if one were an expert, while one, however has neither gifts, nor knowledge, nor calling, nor resources, in order to procure a well-founded, mature conviction, and has scooped his political opinions only from the corrupt source of a political-party newspaper.”
• “Not seriously enough can everyone be warned of so-called political hot air (Kannengießereien) political gibberish as amusement and such loose talk with which the precious time is corrupted and the soul is alienated from God’s bliss.”

In other words, allow fellow Christians the freedom to express a variety of opinions on political topics (as long as they do not disagree with a theological article of faith), keep the church focused on the one thing needful (which is not politics), tone down the rhetoric and bluster, and don’t think of yourself as an expert simply because you saw something on Fox News or MSNBC. To which I might add that it is useful to get beyond the generalities and slogans of your party and address issues as concretely as possible and be prepared to explain the arguments of your opponents in a way which they would deem fair. Also, be humble enough to realize that there will always be unintended consequences for choices you make and your opponent may be quicker to realize that.

Nordic Nightmare

A madman, incensed by the direction of politics in a charming Scandinavian country, killed 80 or 90 of its best and brightest citizens.

Norway in 2011? Actually, I was thinking of Sweden in 1520.


A little background is in order. In 1397 the three Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark formed a united kingdom. (The three crowns, a prominent Swedish national symbol, is a reminder of the once united North.) However, a century later Sweden had grown dissatisfied with the arrangement, in large measure because the Swedish aristocracy was used to playing a much more independent role in politics. While a significant portion of the Swedish aristocracy favored continuing the Union of Kalmar (as the united monarchy was called), many noblemen did not. In early November of 1520, Christian II of Denmark assembled many of the leading Swedish dissidents in Stockholm and ordered their execution. At least 82 people were executed and perhaps more.

What was the result? Christian II earned the title “Christian the Tyrant,” as he is still known in Sweden. (Contrary to popular Swedish opinion, Christian II is not called “Christian the Good” in Denmark.) Sweden was soon in revolt and even the Danes did not want him. He was driven from his throne and replaced by his uncle Frederick I. Christian II tried to regain his throne, now by claiming to favor the Lutheran cause, now the Roman Catholic, but neither side trusted him. (Christian II seems to have been as opportunistic in religious matters as his modern Norwegian counterpart, who is not personally religious but likes to think of religion as a placeholder for secular cultural values.) Eventually, things would turn out quite the opposite from what Christian II had wanted. The Swedes not only would gain their independence from Denmark, but they would begin a series of wars through which they would gobble up much formerly Danish territory. For example, Scania, formerly the heart of Danish culture and learning (as embodied by such cities as Malmö and Lund), would be lost in ensuing centuries to Sweden. Norway would remain part of the united monarchy, but eventually the Danes would lose that country, too. Christian’s bloodbath not only hurt Denmark, but eventually assured the rise of the unstoppable Vasa dynasty that built a Swedish empire that covered all the shores of the Baltic Sea.

Ever since Cain killed Abel and built the town of Enoch, people have thought that murder and intrigue could establish an eternal kingdom. How wrong they are.

It's All the Same

“Brussels sprouts and mint ice cream are the same. They’re both food items and they’re green. One is as good as the other. It doesn’t matter which of the two you choose since they taste the same.”

“Dogs and cats are the same. They’re both furry, four-legged pets. One is as good as the other. It doesn’t matter which you choose to have since they are indistinguishable from each other.”

“Christianity and Buddhism are the same. They’re both religions. One is as good as the other. It doesn’t matter which you choose since they teach the same thing.”

Why is it that saying either of the first two statements would get you locked up in an insane asylum, while saying the last one would get you all sorts of accolades? Sane human beings make distinctions.


I am not arguing today whether Christianity is better than Buddhism—or dogs than cats. That merits a separate discussion. But cannot we have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that there is a difference between the two? Cannot we be forthright enough with the facts to agree that a Buddhist’s nirvana would be a Christian’s hell, inasmuch as the abolition of distinct personhood is a Buddhist’s hope and a Christian’s nightmare? Cannot we acknowledge that Christianity and Buddhism have different attitudes toward the existence of God (Christianity affirming His existence while Buddhism leaving the question open)? Cannot we admit that Christianity and Buddhism address fundamentally different concerns (Christianity seeks the redemption of the created world, while Buddhism seeks the avoidance of pain)? Cannot we agree that the two religions consequently propose different means to achieve their different ends?

Why do people try to equate the various religions? Sometimes they do so because they are too ignorant about religion to know the distinctions. I can’t tell Pepsi from Coca Cola because I drink soda so rarely that I don’t have enough of a basis to make a judgment on the matter. But that doesn’t mean they’re the same. Similarly, people who know very little about world religions are apt to make generalizations that aren’t true. But more often people talk this way because they figure that this is the only way that peace can exist among the various religions. Ignorant of history, these people assume that most wars have been fought over religion and so they assume that getting all religious people to agree that their religions are all the same will stop all wars. But while wars have sometimes been fought over religion, religion is a surprisingly rare cause of war; moreover, even wars that start out as overtly religious (such as the Thirty Years’ War) are quickly overtaken by political concerns and find the participants crossing confessional lines (as Catholic France and Protestant Prussia allied themselves against Catholic Austria and Protestant Denmark in that same war). You can have people of different religions living in the same or neighboring countries without going to war, just as you can put dog lovers and cat lovers in the same room and still keep the peace. To say otherwise is not only insulting to the various religions, but is also to dismiss the experience of most of history.

Ostensibly, ignoring the differences between religions will open dialogue. In reality, there is no quicker way to shut it down. As the French say, vive la différence!

Special Ops

I grew up in a wonderful church. It was a vibrant congregation that in somewhere around 30 years or so had grown to have 1500 members, 900 of whom you would see in church on a typical Sunday and 500 of whom would stick around for Sunday school or Bible class. It operated a full parochial school, K-8, with about 200 students and a separate class for every grade. I cannot praise highly enough the spiritual and academic foundation I received in that school. There are hymns I know today by heart because I learned them in school. And I discovered that my grade school education at their school prepared me to excel even in the academically most rigorous public high school in that city (and indeed one of the top in a state known for its fine public school system at the time).

But there was one fault it had, a rather common fault among large churches, as I have since discovered: the members constantly made snide comments about smaller churches, especially if they happened to be struggling. When a mission—their own daughter church!—faltered as it tried to get off the ground, there was a great amount of glee, for the failure of others underscored their own success. Consequently, my home congregation really didn’t understand smaller churches and looked at them with an attitude of contempt mixed with pity.

I have been able to get a different perspective because God has called me to serve smaller churches. Small churches and huge churches have been around since the beginning of Christianity. Jerusalem, Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome were the megachurches of the first century, while most of the other first century churches were small churches. (When Ignatius of Antioch wrote his letters a century after Christ’s birth, he assumed that all Christians in a city could fit in a large room of a house where all could see the bishop presiding over the service.) More importantly, big churches and small churches operate differently from each other, occupy different niches, and must be encouraged to flourish if the Christian church is to continue to advance.


Big churches excel at offering a wide variety of programs, each of which is likely to serve at least one significant segment of their membership. They tend to be homogenous, where people share a common ethnicity, language, and economic class. Often large churches have grown up in newly settled areas, where members experience the phenomenon of being pioneers both on their block and in their church. If the large church remains in a stable community, it can flourish for many decades or even centuries. Its large size makes it fairly economical to run, its programs will be of a high caliber, and it can help the church-at-large address needs that a smaller church or even a consortium of smaller churches cannot address.

Big churches, however, have to do things in a big way. That means that the pastor and church leaders are constantly having to make big and sweeping changes, from building new sanctuaries to revamping youth ministry from the ground up. However, big changes also can quickly alienate members and lead to a steep decline. In smaller churches a big change could be ameliorated by a close relationship between the pastor and church leaders on the one hand and the ordinary lay members on the other, but the size of a large congregation will dictate that the pastor will know few people well except for key lay leaders. As long as a large congregation’s members are fairly homogenous, whatever decisions the leadership makes will probably reflect the values of the membership. However, when major demographic changes occur or controversial decisions have to be made, the longstanding members often feel that the one connection they had to the church has been lost and they move elsewhere.

The problems of small churches are rather obvious. They can be just one major building repair from closure. Moreover, it seems woefully inefficient to train a pastor and send him to preach to a few dozen people. But small churches have a degree of agility unknown to larger congregations. Because small churches value relationships among their members and because the pastor knows his members well, it is easier to introduce new programs or to be more flexible in making changes. It is here that the church is most like to cross boundaries of ethnicity, culture, and class. Moreover, small churches have historically had a much better record than large churches of bringing in people from outside the Christian church. (To the degree that evangelism work is faltering now in the U.S., it is in large part because small churches have forgotten their missionary task and left it up to large churches, which are less capable in this area. In part this is because many formerly large churches in urban and rural areas have become small churches, but are still acting as if they were large churches.)

Rather than throw stones at each other, large and small churches should see themselves as valuable partners in God’s kingdom. Large churches are very much like the regular forces of an army, while small churches are more like special ops. When trying to hold ground or establish a beachhead, as on D-Day, an army needs hundreds of infantry troops backed by artillery, air support, and all the other specialties of an armed force. But when trying to make a lightning raid or sabotage some facility of the enemy, a large army is useless and special ops are needed. In a similar way, large churches take the beachhead and hold it against the satanic foe by bringing all of their specialties to bear, while smaller churches need to use their agility to make advance strikes against the devil’s kingdom.

A few years ago the U.S. Army rethought its entire strategy as they realized they needed more than just combat troops on the ground. It is time for people in the church to realize that we need something better than the one-size-fits-all policy we have now.

Chaos Theory

A month or so ago I read that a new style of bike lanes are coming to Chicago. They are modeled on those recently installed in New York and many cities in Europe. (See the picture below of a protected bike lane in Paris.) Rather than having bicycles serve as a safety buffer for parked vehicles, parked vehicles will serve as a safety buffer for the cyclists. The bicycle lanes are also much wider so that cyclists won’t have to worry about getting “doored” by a parked car. While I recognized that this is inherently safer for bicyclists, I hadn’t thought about another point until I read it in Barbara Brotman’s column in the Chicago Tribune: these new bike lanes tend to attract saner bicyclists; you see grandparents and grandchildren cycling at a leisurely pace rather than just bike messenger wannabes. I commented to some friends that it made sense. You put people in a crazy situation and you foster crazy behavior. You put them in a saner situation and you foster saner behavior.


Later I realized that I could be understood to be implying that people are simply the product of their environment, which is not what I meant. And that prompted me to think about the discussions of nature versus nurture, which usually go awry. Those who argue that nature determines all point to people raised in Dickensian conditions who still turned out all right. Those who argue that the environment is determinative point to how improved living conditions have reduced crime.

What gets lost in the whole nature/nurture debate is that both nature and nurture serve as limits. The nature of something will determine what that object is capable of; the environment will help determine which of those possibilities comes to fruition. But an object cannot go beyond its nature. A rose bush will always be a rose bush; perhaps it will be a scraggly one or a beautiful one, but it will never yield peonies or give birth to calves. The environment in which that rose bush resides may hinder it or foster growth, but the environment cannot make the rose bush achieve things that it is incapable of. Thus, a rose bush with a hardy nature may do well in a poor environment, while a rose bush with a defective nature will not flourish under even the best conditions.

Thus, no human being can outperform his or her true potential. If sometimes we are surprised by what we deem extraordinary behavior (such as horrific crimes or heroic feats of valor), it indicates that we had not previously considered the full range of human nature. As creatures of God designed originally to reflect His image, we have almost angelic qualities of a rational mind and appreciation for the good. As fallen beings, curved inward on ourselves, we also taint everything with our sin and are capable of great evil. Moreover, as creatures made by God to be social beings, it is our nature as humans to be nurtured by other humans and to take seriously the environment in which we find ourselves. But as creatures created to be individuals rather than thoughtless cogs in a wheel, we will not always listen to other people or conform to their ideas.

And so we come back to the question of bicyclists on the road. What is the range of possible human behavior while on two wheels? Will anyone be a perfect bicyclist, always observant of the rules of the road, courteous and gracious and forgiving of motorists without exception? No. Our fallen nature will not permit that. But aside from that, there are plenty of other options. One is for bicyclists to cultivate their sense of fairness and behave decently while on the road. Another is for bicyclists to use their sense of fairness to chastise bad motorists, but to ignore that morality in their own case so that they can ride selfishly (since it is somewhat to their advantage). That route, the way of hypocrisy, is rather common, both on and off the road, since it allows people to enjoy the fruits of selfish behavior while savoring the feeling of moral indignation at others. One more option is simply to engage in boorish behavior, perhaps now and then trying to excuse it as what is necessary to survive on the road.

Given that range available in human nature, it is easy to see how chaotic situations can breed chaotic behavior. We don’t need much more than our sinful nature to get us to sin, and so it doesn’t help when other people (whether obnoxious drivers or fellow cyclists behaving badly) give us a good excuse to manifest that sinfulness. Of course, we may recognize that our behavior is counterproductive and resist the temptation. Not every bicyclist is trying to drive in as wicked a manner as possible. But chaos does make the temptation all the more alluring. By the same token, a saner environment can encourage saner behavior, if for no other reason than it allows people the chance to flaunt their self-righteousness. Self-righteousness doesn’t pass muster with God, but at least it allows for a more pleasant bike ride.

Modernity, Meet Moses

In my last blog I urged you to consider the bigger worldviews that give a framework for understanding your studies. In part, this was to enable you to address another question: why would any Post-Enlightenment individual study our Scriptures? In fact, why would institutions dedicated to fostering a Post-Enlightenment view of the world (such as public universities and deconfessionalized private colleges) offer courses on the Bible?

The fact is that the Post-Enlightenment world is very curious about our Scriptures. Just as well read Christians are eager to know as much about the intellectual thought of the past three centuries, so serious Post-Enlightenment thinkers also take the Bible seriously. Both groups believe that a judicious use of their rival’s primary source material may well serve their own cause. Thus, secular universities have no problem offering courses on the Bible, because they believe that they can show how the Scriptures can be made to honor their Post-Enlightenment agenda.


In part, they study the Bible because they believe it is useful for people to know how human thought has unfolded. No one can appreciate fully what Immanuel Kant did at the end of the eighteenth century, if unable to speak of his predecessors, including Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Descartes. In the same way, to understand fully the modern world, one has to study the Bible to see how modern thought builds upon certain of its ideas while rejecting or altering others.

Thus, while Christians see all the books of the Scriptures as having a common theology and proclaiming a common message, Post-Enlightenment biblical scholars argue that the various books of the Bible have nothing in common and that there is a development of theology over the course of the centuries during which the Bible was written. Most commonly, they teach that the oldest patriarchs of Israel were polytheists (believers in many gods) and that their descendants underwent a development from polytheism to henotheism (the belief that there are many gods, but one god is superior to all others) to monotheism (the belief that there is only one god). Of course, if one thinks that the trend of human thought has been to reduce the number of gods over the centuries, it is clear why some would argue that the next step is to subtract one more god and turn monotheism into atheism.

But Post-Enlightenment educators are concerned about more than mere intellectual history. As I mentioned in my previous post, Post-Enlightenment educators are trying to get their students to be autonomous individuals, freed from the shackles of tradition, community, and transcendent authority. And thus a major reason that they teach the Bible in secular universities is to stop students from being deferential to the authority of the Scriptures and their church. The Scripture is praised for its poesy and vivid metaphors and fine sentiments, but in the process the Scripture is no longer able to be the voice of the living God. Those students who had previously been Christian and had heard the voice of God in the Scriptures confronting them in judgment and mercy now are taught instead to confront and judge the Scriptures. The voice of autonomous man speaks; the voice of the living God must keep quiet.

And that explains what seems to be a great irony to those who do not understand the Post-Enlightenment agenda: the highest percentage of non-religious faculty members is to be found in the Religious Studies departments of state universities and deconfessionalized private colleges. They love the Bible no less than Christians do; they just love it in the same way the wolf loves sheep.

The King of Sciences

In a previous blog, I noted that there are two major systems of thought in the Western world, Christianity and post-Enlightenment philosophy. Let me go a step further and note that advocates of each system are concerned with passing on their worldview to the next generation. In fact, they see it as the most central goal of their lives.

Of course, they both realize that their students will have to learn all sorts of other things. Christians and post-Enlightenment thinkers alike want all students to know how to read books, to compose essays, to do arithmetic and more complicated forms of mathematics, to know the elements found in nature, and to know the major events in history. But from the dawn of time until now, all serious educators have understood that they are doing more than teaching isolated facts. They are giving their students a framework with which to understand life in all its complexity. They are teaching what truths are essential and immutable, what means we can use to learn new truths and to distinguish false opinions from the truth, what code of ethics ought to guide our decisions, and what criteria we should use to discern the beautiful and the good.

Christians, therefore, have often referred to theology as the king of the sciences—science here being understood to mean “field of study.” We are not just saying that theology is the most important subject, as if it counts twice as much as history or physics or geography. Instead we mean that one has to have a correct theology if one is not to land in fundamental error in one of the other sciences. For example, if one knows about original sin, much of history becomes self-explanatory. We will understand why there have always been conflicts and always will be. We will be displeased with simplistic histories that assume that one side was all good and the other all evil. We will also dismiss hagiographies masquerading as biographies, for we know that people are more complicated than that. As a consequence we will understand history more profoundly than if we had a more optimistic view of human nature. Similarly, if we understand the created world around us not to be divine but still God’s handiwork, we will know how to approach the sciences, including biology and conservationism. Because Christianity knew that the world was not divine, they were a major force behind the growth of the natural sciences, while paganism thought it sacrilege to look too carefully at nature. But as we appreciate the freedom to explore God’s beautiful world, we treat it with respect as His creation, not adoration. In other words, we have a proper sense of what conservation of this world must entail.

But it is not just Christian theology that offers a comprehensive way of looking at the world. Post-Enlightenment thought also offers a lens through which it views all the phenomena of the world: the autonomous self. Whether that self be the neutral observer or scientist (as Modernism would emphasize) or the authenticator of the truth that appeals to himself or herself (as Post-Modernism would say) or simply a businessperson who manipulates the world for his or her own ends (as American Pragmatism in its crassest form would say), the autonomous self—unshackled from tradition, authority, and anything transcendent—is to hold sway over one’s life. Thus, the whole goal of education in the Post-Enlightenment worldview is to unchain students from anything or anyone that they may have relied upon earlier in their lives and to make them completely self-reliant. One of the chains, as you can well imagine, is Christianity, for it appeals to a transcendent Being (God) and acknowledges a transcendent truth (Christian doctrine) revealed in an authoritative book (the Bible).

Those who have gone through higher education (or are going through it now) would do well to consider to what is their “king of the sciences.” There is much that I have learned from those who look at the world from a thoroughly Post-Enlightenment view and I would not give up that education in the least. At the same time, though, as a serious Christian, I recognize the need to re-evaluate all that I have learned from the vantage point of Christian theology, the king of the sciences. Lord willing, you will see this topic touched upon in many blogs in the future.

Pray Whether You Need To or Not

It was the Monday exactly one week after Labor Day, 2000, and I had not been able to ride on my favorite bicycle trail, the one that goes from Milwaukee and Devon Avenues in Niles, Illinois to the Chicago Botanical Gardens in Glencoe, Illinois, a trail through a heavily forested area that is approximately a 46 mile round trip from my house to the end of the trail and back. As I was driving back that Monday morning from my 8 a.m. Latin class, I was delighted to hear that it would be a nice hot day and there would be only overnight showers. Since I had the rest of the day free, I changed into my bicycle attire and hit the road. By 12:30 or so I had reached the end of the trail and was enjoying a nice little lunch when the “overnight showers” arrived all of a sudden.

They started as a nice, gentle rain, but I made the fortunate decision to return sooner rather than later. Soon the showers were no longer just showers, just as they were not occurring overnight. They were a full fledged thunderstorm, a St.-Anne-I-will-become-a-monk kind of storm. Although I have never been particularly bothered by storms before or since, I’ve also never been outside when I’ve repeatedly counted less than a second between the flash of lightning and the peal of thunder. I came across two trees felled by lightning bolts and lying on the trail. The bike path was abandoned and I was about the only person on it, even though it had been teeming with people earlier. What is worse, the temperature had dropped from the low 90’s to somewhere in the 50’s and I was soaking wet. If I didn’t get fried by a lightning bolt, I would die of hypothermia. Either way, I would die alone on the trail in a metropolitan area of 8 million people.

I eventually came to a part of the trail that ran near a park and I sought shelter by the restrooms until the lightning died down. Then I pedaled my way back to home, some ten miles away at that point. Of course, I was praying the whole time and I said my prayers of thanksgiving once I got home and threw myself into a hot bath to warm up.

And you might think that that was the end of the matter. Sure, I would always remember the event with gratitude to God for His deliverance, but that would be all. But in the spring of the following year I discovered something even more profound. I was in the middle of Lent and we were using the Litany as part of our Lenten midweek services. We came to the line, “From lightning and tempest…Good Lord, deliver us.” And I was struck by how the Lord had indeed heard my prayer.

I had prayed the Litany many times previously, but I had never put much emphasis on the petitions for deliverance “from sudden and evil death.” It isn’t that I was careless in my prayers. I truly meant what I prayed. But I thought that that petition was about as directly applicable to me as the request that God would “preserve all women in the perils of childbirth.” I wasn’t going to die in childbirth or in a thunderstorm, I had thought. Those perils might have loomed large for peasants in the Middle Ages, but not for a modern person like myself. Or so I had thought. But then I discovered that I faced dangers I could not foresee. Even when I thought I didn’t need this particular kind of prayer, I really did. For those many years that I had prayed the Litany and similar prayers, I was asking God to keep me safe on that one day I would face that terrible storm.

The Monday after Labor Day in 2000 was September 11. I need not explain what happened a year later. Just as I was surprised by an unexpected storm in 2000, so the whole nation was surprised by an unexpected war in 2001. For a quarter century it looked as if our prayers for deliverance “from war and bloodshed, from sedition and rebellion” were superfluous or only remotely needed. But since then we have come to realize that those are necessary prayers. And so we pray, whether we feel we need to or not.

I had written about these things many years ago to my parishioners, but early in May there was a confluence of three events: I took my first bike ride for the season, Osama bin Laden was killed, and I recalled how our synodical president had urged us to pray the Litany during Lent. The lesson remains.

Jesus Unplugged—The Comeback Tour

Franklin Graham doesn’t believe that Jesus is truly God. How can I say that? He most certainly professes faith in the divinity of Christ. The problem, though, is that he believes in Christ’s divinity in theory, but not in practice.

This became apparent when he gave a recent interview to Christiana Amanpour, in which he stated that the way that everyone could see Christ’s return is to watch it on a cell phone or laptop or the like. He took the Scriptures seriously enough to believe that everyone will see the return of Christ. But rather than believe that Christ could accomplish this because He is truly God, Graham cast about for a technological solution.

Of course, he couldn’t solve the problem by technology. Vast numbers of people, even in the United States, are too poor or too isolated to have cell phones or internet access. Even those of who have cell phones and computers leave them behind or turn them off for periods of time. Thus, I didn’t find out until this morning that Osama bin Laden had been killed, even though the news was broadcast far and wide all night long. Had I been camping or hiking, it would have been even worse, since I often cannot get cell phone reception, let alone internet, in the mountains. If God has to use the internet in order to let everyone see Christ’s return, then months will go by before everyone will see Him—in direct contradiction to our Lord’s promise that all will see Him instantly without need of anyone prompting them (Matthew 24:23-27). And so the people of the 1960’s were right, after all: the revolution will not be televised.

But why was Franklin Graham forced to look for a technological solution, however lame it might be? He was following a trajectory of thought that goes back to Ulrich Zwingli that has influenced most of Protestantism with the exception of Lutheranism. This is often called “Reformed” theology, and although that title usually applies only to Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, and similar groups, their view of Christ is widely shared by rival Protestants such as Arminians (e.g., Methodists), who differ sharply with the Reformed on other issues such as conversion and election. If you were to ask those with a Reformed view of Christ whether He can be with us always (Matthew 28:20), they would tell you, “No. His human nature is locked up in heaven, although His divine spirit can be with us.” Does our Lord know all things (John 16:30; 21:17)? “No. In His divine nature He does, but His human nature is incapable of knowing all things, since (like any human being) He has a finite mental capacity, even if He is highly intelligent.” Can Jesus do all things, even the miraculous (Luke 18:27; Colossians 1:16-17)? “No. The man Jesus can do many great things, like one of the saints of old, only with even greater powers. He can do wonders but is not omnipotent.” Does His blood have the divine power to cleanse us from our sins (1 John 1:7; Colossians 1:22)? “No. His divine spirit can forgive us, but His human nature does not have that power.” In short, does the fullness of the Godhead dwell in Christ in bodily form (Colossians 2:9)? “By no means. Finite man is not capable of the infinite God. The human Jesus is incapable of bearing the fullness of the deity of the Son of God.”

Now you might well wonder if the Reformed believe that Jesus’ humanity is so deeply separated from His divine nature, do they really believe in the incarnation—that the Son of God became flesh and thus Jesus Christ is true God and true man in one person? That is a good question. The best answer I can give is that in theory they truly believe in the incarnation and in Christ’s deity, but in practice they do not. It is no surprise that where a Reformed view of Christ predominated, Unitarianism and other movements have arisen that denied Christ’s deity altogether. They simply denied in theory what the Reformed had been denying all along in practice.

It would be far better, though, if Franklin Graham and others could simply accept that Jesus is God’s Son—and He won’t need a microphone for His voice to be heard or a TV screen for Him to be seen.

© 2011 James A. Kellerman

Descriptive or Prescriptive? (Part 2)

As Lutherans consider what the most appropriate way is to arrange their worship services, we naturally turn to Augsburg Confession article 24 (hereafter AC 24). That article explains what the practice of the Lutheran reformers had been: they retained the traditional liturgy with great reverence, although they made some minor changes to it (AC 24.1-2). However, at least one person has objected that this is merely a description of the way that Lutherans were worshipping in 1530, when the Augsburg Confession was written, and is not necessarily normative for Lutheran worship in 2011. After all, AC 24.2 states that some vernacular hymns have been added to the Latin chants—a situation that no longer characterizes even the most conservative of liturgical circles, where little if any Latin is used. Thus, it seems as if AC 24 has little directly to say to us today.

This objection, however, overlooks one major truth, a truth that anyone who has studied literature of any kind ought to know. The descriptive is never merely descriptive. There is always something to be taken away—an attitude to be adopted, a lesson to be learned, a pattern to be emulated. And, thus, we should not expect the descriptive passages in the confessions (or, for that matter, in the Scriptures) to be merely trivial historical information to be quickly forgotten or dismissed as irrelevant. And this is doubly true when a description is part of an argument in a given work.

Lutherans were not describing their worship practices to Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire with idle intent. AC 24, like all of AC 22-28, is an explanation of Lutheran “innovations”: giving the laity the blood of Christ (AC 22), allowing priests to marry (AC 23), changing how the private confession of sins was handled (AC 25), changing the rules on fasting (AC 26), allowing monks and nuns to abandon their vocations (AC 27), and limiting the purview of bishops (AC 28). In each of these instances Philipp Melanchthon, the author of the Augsburg Confession, argued that Lutherans were following sound, biblical practices and were in agreement with the church fathers and the traditions of the church. This was not an argument made in a vacuum. In 1530 it wasn’t clear to most people—Protestant or Roman Catholic—who Lutherans were and what they believed. And since some hotheads were running around Germany at that time overturning civil society, engaging in revolt, and leading people into general debauchery, the Lutherans had to distinguish themselves from such people. And so throughout the Augsburg Confession, but especially in the section on the practices (AC 22-28), Lutherans insist that they are good catholics (small c) who are trying to correct Roman innovations by returning to an older, historical practice.

It is in this context that they explain their worship services. They are not schismatics or heretics, but follow the usual rites of the mass (AC 24.1; the references throughout this discussion are to the Latin version of AC 24). Based on an apostolic command, they have added elements in the vernacular so that people can understand the mass better (24.2-3). But this was not controversial since there were vernacular hymns used in the mass in pre-Reformation times.

Most of the article deals with two controversial “innovations”: encouraging frequent communion (24.5-9, 34-39) and stopping the buying and selling of private masses (24.10-33). In essence, the mass was being transformed: no longer was it a private mercantile transaction where a priest (often alone without a server, which even the Council of Trent would later recognize to be wrong) said a mass for someone’s benefit and no one communed; instead it was to be a communal worship service where people were expected to receive the sacrament.

At first glance, all this seemed contrary to church tradition and historical practice, but Melanchthon argues that the Roman practice is actually contrary to the longer history of the Christian church, as well as the church canons and the teachings of Scripture and the church fathers. Rome had come to teach that having a mass said for oneself was safer than communing. Thus, hardly anyone communed more than once or twice a year, even though masses were being celebrated practically hourly at every side altar in the church. The Lutherans responded that people were being communed only after due instruction and admonition (24.6-9). They were not distributing the sacrament irresponsibly. Moreover, the mass was to be a public celebration of the Lord’s Supper, with the distribution of the elements as the norm, as attested by church fathers such as Ambrose (24.33), Gregory (24.35), Chrysostom (24.36), canon law of the most ancient and revered kind (24.37-38), the Scriptures (24.39), and church history (24.41). In addition, private masses reflect a misunderstanding of sacrifice (24.21-27), justification (24.28-29), and the remembering of Christ (24.30-33). Thus, if anyone was to be faulted for violating church tradition and bringing in radical innovations, it was the bishops under Rome, who ignored both canon law and apostolic mandate (24.10-13) and permitted the abuses of the private masses that brought scandal to Christianity (24.14-20). Thus, Lutherans were the ones who maintained the tradition, and Rome was the one who innovated. It was precisely out of respect for not only Scripture but also the witness of the church throughout the ages that the ceremonies of the mass were largely kept, although the number of masses was reduced to those where people could actually attend (24.40).

This is a tightly argued article that uses catholic arguments—Scripture and tradition—to show that an alleged innovation (frequent communion) is actually historic practice and that an alleged established practice (private masses) is really a medieval innovation. But other than changing these two practices to follow more ancient usage, the Lutherans did not change the liturgy much. Why? They were catholics at heart—not Romanists, to be sure, but people who saw themselves in the continuity of church history.

Of course, one should not romanticize about what the historic liturgy was, as if it has always been the same in all places and eras. Church tradition has allowed variety and flexibility of customs while maintaining a common core. (That is a topic for a blog all of its own.) But AC 24 was never about how much Latin was or was not in a service or how many times people were to genuflect, but about whether or not Lutherans see themselves as schismatics. It powerfully warns Lutherans today not to follow the sectarianism of American Protestantism, which tends to believe that the church didn’t exist between the death of the Apostle John and the birth of Michael Card. It soundly rejects modern church-planting gurus who emphasize telling prospective members “We’re not your father’s church” and who poke fun at the stodgy saints of yesteryear. In short, it warns us against letting a truncated and schismatic ecclesiology shape our liturgy. And thus AC 24 retains its normative power today among serious Lutherans.

© 2011 James A. Kellerman

Descriptive or Prescriptive? (Part one)

At a recent conference, which was addressing the topic of Lutheran worship, a speaker suggested that Augsburg Confession 24, which speaks of Lutherans retaining the traditional worship forms albeit with some elements in the vernacular, was descriptive rather than prescriptive. The speaker went on to add that both the Scriptures and the Lutheran confessions speak sometimes descriptively and other times prescriptively, and we must distinguish between them. The point is well taken insofar as it goes. To emulate everything in the Bible would force us into all sorts of absurdities. We would have to betray Jesus, as Judas did, or cut off people’s ears with swords, as Peter did. Even genuinely godly behavior is not always to be emulated, or else we would all have to imitate Abraham and leave our home countries.

But what do we do with the descriptive parts of the Scriptures and of the Lutheran confessions? Do we simply say, “How quaint!” and ignore them as utterly irrelevant? Even if we agree that we cannot do everything exactly as in those passages, can they teach us something? This was an issue that was left unaddressed by the speaker, but one that I would like to explore in this and a subsequent blog.

The example given by the speaker might actually help us begin the conversation. He quoted Acts 2:44-45: “And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.” (ESV) The vast majority of Christians have not followed this particular practice. Indeed, it was abandoned already in apostolic times. But does it have anything to say to us today?

First of all, we really ought to look at the full context of that passage—and by that I mean the whole book of Acts. Acts 2 tells us that the early church held all things in common and distributed money and other items as the faithful had need. But Acts 5 and 6 tell us that such a setup has its shortcomings—both on the supply and demand side of things. Some people began to withhold their contributions to the supply side (Acts 5:1-2), while others didn’t speak Hebrew well enough to ask that they be included on the demand side (Acts 6:1). It all became a nightmare for the early church, not least for the apostles (Acts 6:2). Eventually, the practice seems to have died out, but it did not end the church’s concern for the poor, as Acts 11:27-30; 20:35; 24:17 indicate. Thus, if anyone wants to adopt an Acts 2:44 methodology, he should expect problems of an Acts 5 and 6 nature to follow. (Note that the Saxon immigrants who came to Missouri in 1839 and eventually founded the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod tried an Acts 2 approach, too. The disastrous consequences are well documented in Zion on the Mississippi.)

But there is a further point that can be made. I dare say that the current practices of my church resemble more the second chapter of Acts than they do a chapter out of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations or, for that matter, Karl Marx's Das Kapital. The early church was so enthusiastic about the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ that they treated their personal property as of secondary importance. Perhaps they were a bit naïve in the way they helped the poor in their midst—just as I was a bit naïve in some of the ways I helped the homeless in the early years of my ministry. The early church wised up but didn’t lose their generous spirit, and I and my parishioners have done the same.

I wish I could take credit for this, but if anything they were the ones who taught me how much the spirit (if not the letter) of Acts 2 was alive among them. One time my car gave out and it was going to be a couple of days before I could get it back. One of my parishioners called me up and said that her husband was on his way bringing their car over to me. Would I just drop him off at home and then use their car until I got mine back? Now you might think that they did this because of the funny collar I wear, but I’ve seen them at work and I know that they have done this for other people in the congregation. When I thanked them for loaning their car to me, they said, “But, Pastor, you’ve given us rides when we weren’t comfortable travelling that far.” Well, yes, I had, but wasn’t that just a normal function of being a Christian? And then it dawned on me that without giving up entirely the notion of private property we were functioning much more like Acts 2 than I had realized. Each of us had a title to a car, but we didn’t let that get in the way of providing transportation for others in need. And that is as it ought to be.

And so we return to the original question. If Augsburg Confession 24 is largely descriptive, does it lose all prescriptive force? Not necessarily. We will have to look at the passage in its broader context and we then see if the spirit behind those words may help direct and govern our behavior today. I will examine those points in greater detail in a separate blog.

© 2011 James A. Kellerman

Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday (Feb. 13), 2011

And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light. And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were terrified. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and have no fear.” And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only.

And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Tell no one the vision, until the Son of Man is raised from the dead.”

Beloved in Christ, there are vast segments of Christianity that believe that to be a good Christian you must be seeking one kind of glorious experience or another. They might not all agree on what that experience must be, but they agree that a Christian should be living a wonderful and victorious life. For some that means having frequent mystical experiences of oneness with God. For others it means speaking exuberantly in tongues. For still others it means living in a state of perfection without any trace of sin. Whatever it is that they think is a glorified state of being, they believe that we should be experiencing it fully right now.

However, those Christians who embrace a sound, biblical way of thinking will not draw the same conclusion. For us it is the cross that is front and center. It is the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross that is foremost in a Christian’s life. The cross of Jesus reminds us of the enormity cost of our sin. The cross calls us to repent of our sins, but it also proclaims that we are saved by the death of Jesus. It isn’t our glorious experiences that will save us, but the death of the Son of God. And thus we should not expect glory in this life. But doesn’t today’s gospel seem to refute us? Here is glory in abundance. Here is nothing but pure, unadulterated glory. It is a mega dose of glory, enough to knock the disciples nearly unconscious. Where are the cross and the suffering and the shame? They are nowhere to be found. Here is nothing but glory.

Of course, it was a glorious day for the disciples. No one should think otherwise. We too experience our moments of glory, just as those three disciples got to see the glory of Christ on the mountain. We emphasize the cross instead of glory, but don’t think that there will never be glorious occasions such as this. In fact, we look forward to experiencing glorious moments such as this for all eternity. The three disciples had a glimpse of Christ’s glory, a vision of the glory to be, such as we will always see in the resurrection life. All Christians agree that in the life to come there will be only glory. But the question remains: during this life should we expect to experience only glory or should we expect to experience the cross of suffering and sorrow? Should we focus only on accumulating moments of glory or should we rather expect our Lord to place a cross upon us? And how do we handle moments of glory and moments of the cross?

Peter didn’t handle this glorious situation well. Jesus was speaking, but Peter was so overcome by his emotions that he interrupted Him. Furthermore, his comments showed that he really didn’t understand the situation. He offered to build three booths, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah—as if all three were equally prophets before God. Peter was so confused in what he was saying that God the Father had to cut him off. He drew Peter’s attention to Jesus and said to listen to Him, for He was the Father’s beloved Son. It is not that Peter could not listen to Moses or Elijah, but that instead Peter should listen most attentively to Christ—even if Christ was speaking about “[going] to Jerusalem and [suffering] many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and [being] killed, and on the third day [being] raised.”

If you’re tempted to be too hard on Peter, you should realize he did what any one of us would have done. In fact, I wonder if he might not have done better than most of us. When we are put in a situation of great glory, we can easily become spiritual infants. We forget whatever we have previously learned. We babble nonsense as Peter did. And then when we are reprimanded as Peter was, we fall in fear on our faces. Glory turns us into blithering fools.

Why is that? We always had been blithering fools. We just didn’t know it until the thoughts of glory drove away any restraint. When things are going grand for us, we are tempted to show off the pride that resides inside of us. But “pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Our arrogance causes us to stumble. That is why glorious moments are dangerous to us. There is nothing wrong with the glorious moments themselves. Jesus even basked in such glory. But He could handle it without falling into sin, whereas we could not.

And thus the problem is our sin, not the experience of glory. And that is why the best news that we can hear is that we have a Savior, who rescues us from our sin. He could have enjoyed nothing but glory forever, but He knew that we needed to be saved. And so He went off to die on a cross. He endured that most painful and shameful death because He cared about more than Himself or a little glory. He cared about us. But—irony of ironies—it is precisely because He cared more about us than His own glory that He is now exalted and glorified for all time. He doesn’t cling to that glory in a selfish way, which is why it is more than appropriate for Him to have it.

We Christians cannot make sense of glory unless we are willing to walk in the way of the cross. Peter talked foolishly because he looked only at the glory of the moment and didn’t want to hear our Lord’s instructions about His death. That is why our Lord told him as they were coming down the mountain, “Tell no one the vision, until the Son of Man is raised from the dead.” Only when Christ had been crucified and raised from the dead would Peter be able to put everything into its proper context. Only when we see God’s greatest work in the cross of Christ will we be able to understand the ups and downs of life.

Oh, yes, Peter’s experience was an up moment. He was given a real privilege to be one of the three chosen to see this vision. And God gives us glorious moments now and then, too. They are to be treasured as gifts, for they remind us of an even greater glory to come. Perhaps we are moved by seeing a perfect sunset. We are being reminded of a time when God and the Lamb will be our sun that never goes down. Perhaps we are honored at our job or in our community. We are being reminded of a time when God will honor all His faithful people at a banquet that will never end. Perhaps we are just having a great time with our friends and it seems to be a perfect day. We are being reminded of a time when we will enjoy a never ending fellowship with all the saints.

And so our glorious moments are to be cherished as visions of the glory to come. But Peter couldn’t spend the rest of his life on that mountaintop and neither can we. Experiences like those are glimpses of the future glory, not the full package. And thus we thank God for those experiences and we consider how best to make use of them. Perhaps the most important truth that we can learn is that we won’t be learning the most during our mountaintop experiences. Yes, we may think about them later on and draw some conclusions later, but we will often lack that wisdom at the time. Peter talked like a fool on the mountain, but years later, as he knew his death was drawing near, he wrote, “We have something more sure [than the vision], the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Peter understood the importance of the prophecies of Scripture by that point, but he had been too busy yakking on the mountain to pay any attention to Moses or Elijah, let alone Jesus.

It was only by going down into the valley and paying careful attention to the words of Jesus and following Him all the way to Jerusalem and to the cross that he learned what that glorious vision had meant. It was only by seeing himself not as a success—one of the hand picked individuals chosen to hobnob with Moses and Elijah—but as a failure, a person who denied Jesus and ran away from Him, that Peter came to understand who Jesus was. It was only when Peter knew that he was a forgiven sinner that he could be an apostle. It is only when we are willing to go into the valley of sorrow that we learn what we should have learned from our glorious moments.

So let us not be frightened by the fact that we have to leave the mountain, for Christ is with us in the valley no less than on the mountaintop. Christ is at the heart of our life, wherever we are. Whether He is transfigured before us or simply plods along to the cross, He remains faithfully by our side. And therefore we are not frightened by the way of the cross nor will we cling mindlessly to glory. In Jesus’ name. Amen.