LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2001, Page 381

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THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS 381

21. This Is My Body, 322. See also Sasse’s “Observations on
Romans 16:17-18 (1955)” in Scripture and the Church: Selected
Essays of Hermann Sasse, Jeffrey J. Kloha and Ronald R. Feuer-
hahn, eds.. Concordia Seminary Monograph Series, Number 2 (St.
Louis: Concordia Seminary, 1995), 253-59. Sasse argues that
whenever we find the exhortation in the New Testament “Greet one
another with a holy kiss” (1 Cor. 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:12; Rom. 16:16;
| Thess. 5:26; | Peter 5:14), this indicates that the reading of an
apostolic epistle (otherwise, a sermon) was followed by the cele-
bration of the Lord’s Supper (254).

22. Martin Franzmann, Romans, in Concordia Commentary se-
ries (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1968), 277.

23. Franzmann argued that the doctrine or teaching referred to
in verse 17 “is best left in its broadest and fullest sense: all that the
Christians of Rome had heard, learned, believed, obeyed, and said
yea to, all that had made mathetai [disciples] of them—that is the
norm by which the divisions and offenses, and the creators of them,
are to be measured and rejected. The point of cleavage is, ina
word, the Gospel.” “Exegesis on Romans 16:17 ff.,” Concordia
Journal 7 (January 1981), 15. Franzmann noted, “If we study oc-
currences of skandalon and skandalizo in the New Testament, we
shall find that in almost every instance where men cause (or are)
offenses, they are within the church visible.”(19). He then con-
cluded: “Our findings suggest that the interpretation traditional in
our circles is essentially sound” (19). By “our circles” Franzmann
meant the old Synodical Conference. But the same view of Rom.
16:17 was held already by Luther, who spoke of “[a]ll of St. Paul’s
warnings, Romans 16 [:17-18], I Corinthians 10 [:14], Galatians
3, 4, and 5, Colossians 2 [:8], and elsewhere, and all the sayings of
the prophets in which they teach us to avoid human teaching....
Thus we conclude that wherever there is a Christian congregation
in possession of the gospel, it not only has the right and power but
also the duty—on pain of losing the salvation of its souls and in
accordance with the promise made to Christ in baptism—to avoid,
to flee, to depose, and to withdraw from the authority that our bish-
ops, abbots, monasteries, religious foundations, and the like are
now exercising. For it is clearly evident that they teach and rule
contrary to God and his word.” LW, 39:308-309. Franzmann, in-
cidentally, also commends (14) the “careful and objective study”
of Robert Hoerber, A Grammatical Study of Romans 16:17 (Mil-
waukee: Northwestern, 1948). Hoerber had shown the grammatical
untenability of the argument that what the text really means to re-
ject as “contrary to the doctrine [the Romans] had learned” is not
false doctrine but divisiveness.

Sasse writes: “[T]his word of Paul [Rom. 16:17f.] can only be
applied in the sense in which the Apostle used it. It is a word which
is directed against heretics, against every heresy which destroys the
Gospel of Jesus Christ. Such heresies are the great heresies of the
ancient church; and also the great heresies which are rejected by
the ‘condemnations’ of the Book of Concord are meant, as well as
the false teachings of our day such as Rationalism, Liberalism, and
the great sects of the present...A church which calls itself Lutheran
and yet has fellowship with the false doctrines that are rejected in
our confessions would cease to be an orthodox church.” “Observa-
tions on Romans 16:17-18," 257.

24. Sasse notes that “heresy is always a denial of Christ, even if
the heretic doesn’t want that.” “Observations on Romans
16:17-18,” [see note 15], 256.

25. Martin Franzmann wrote regarding Rom. 16:17-18: “Verse
17 takes no cognizance of intentions at all; it states with the utmost
objectivity that the errorists to be avoided do in fact occasion divi-
sions and offenses counter to the received teaching...But does not
verse 18 give us further characteristics to aid us in identifying the
errorists to be avoided? The exegete will have to point to the form

and the content of the sentence and answer, ‘No.’ ...the attitudes
here ascribed to them are such as are not empirically verifiable, and
the methods attributed to them are exactly the kind that make iden-
tification difficult.” “Exegesis on Rom. 16:17 ff.,” 16.

26. H. P. Hamann examined some typical anti-heresy texts and
concluded that most of them are “‘so wide and general in their form
that they must apply directly” to false doctrine in all times and
places. In the other two texts (Titus 3:10 and 2 John 9—] 1) Paul and
John are “applying to specific situations what was to them ax-
iomatic for all false doctrine.” | Timothy 4:1-6 “‘is interesting in
that it shows the same principle at work in respect of teachings
which strike us, on the face of things, as comparatively minor mat-
ters,...the abstaining from meats, in fact being a wrong teaching in
respect of adiaphora even.” He added: “Actually Rom. 16:17, 18
is no more difficult than the rest of the texts quoted so far, and
could easily have been treated in the same group, with parallel
phrases to Matt. 7:15; Tit. 3:10; Gal. 1:8, 9...What better solution
of the problem is there than that which resolutely denies fellow-
ship to perverters of the truth, false teachers, heretics, refuses them
the hand of fellowship, brotherly recognition, support for their false
teaching (2 John 9-11), but which at the same time leaves the mat-
ter of their soul’s salvation to God’s perfect judgment...Our texts
speak in blacks and whites. We almost wish for texts which said a
little about greys. As the matter stands, there does not seem to be
any text in the Bible which has a good word to say for errorists, or
which while granting their essential Christianity on the one hand,
condemns their error on the other. It is always the two opposites
which we see.” “An Examination of the Relation of Certain Pas-
sages of the N.T. to the Problem of Fellowship,” unpublished
essay, ca. 1962, 56.

27. “We should have preferred, and we besought and petitioned
the Almighty, that our churches and schools might have been pre-
served in the teaching of God’s Word and in agreeable Christian
concord and that they might have been well managed and carried
on in a Christian fashion and in harmony with God’s Word, as they
were while Dr. Luther was alive. Nevertheless, just as, while the
holy apostles were still alive, it happened that false teachers insin-
uated perverted teachings into the churches in which the apostles
themselves had planted the pure, unadulterated Word of God, so
such teachers were also inflicted on our churches because of our
own and the ungrateful world’s impenitence and sin.” Preface to
the Book of Concord, Tappert, 4.

28. The Nicene Creed simply confesses that the church is “one,
holy, catholic, and apostolic.” John Meyendorff remarks: “Curi-
ously enough, the ecclesiological problem was never formally
posed as a real issue in the medieval debate between Constantino-
ple and Rome.” The Orthodox Church (Crestwood. New York: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981), 209.

29. Tappert divides these words from the Apology into two sen-
tences (169),

30. The “true unity of the church” is defined thus in the Ger-
man of paragraph 31: “We say that those are called one harmonious
church who believe in one Christ, have one Gospel, one Spirit, one
faith [creed], the same sacraments, and so are speaking of spiritual
unity, without which faith and a Christian ethos cannot exist.”
Compare paragraph 10 (German): “[T]hat number and those people
are the right church, who, here and there in the world, from the ris-
ing of the sun to its setting, truly believe in Christ, who then have
one Gospel, one Christ, one and the same Baptism and Sacrament,
are governed by one Holy Spirit, even though they have differing
ceremonies.” See also XX, 6 (German): “[T]he opponents condemn
the manifest divine truth and the right, Christian, blessed, holy doc-
trine, without which no Christian church can at all exist, which
every Christian, so far as his body and life extend, is bound to con-

2001 Convention Workbook