LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2001, Page 408

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

⤓ Download .txt · copy text

408 ADDITIONAL THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS AND REPORTS—OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

regeneration. So a Lutheran attending a Reformed church might
find himself receiving what purports to be the Lord’s Supper from
a Baptist who denies that children are morally accountable because
of original sin or capable of faith and salvation through Baptism. At
stake here are Augustana ff and IX.

(2) The Agreement notes that “ordinations in both traditions
have usually been by presbyters,” but acknowledges that one per-
son as a bishop may act in behalf of presbyteries and synods. This
may not be a significant issue for the presenters of this critique, but
one cannot help note that the likely-to-be-revived ELCA Concordat
with the Episcopal Church requires ordination by a bishop and con-
secration of ELCA bishops by Episcopal bishops.

(3) Ordination of women as pastors (ministers; presbyters) is
not a problem for fellowship between churches, except for a few
like the Missouri Synod and the Roman Catholic Church, and is
simply taken for granted in the Agreement.

(4) Any differences on justification are simply put to the side:
“there are no substantive matters concerning justification that di-
vided us.” This conclusion is based on defining justification as
“forgiveness of sins and renewal of life.” The Roman Catholic-
ELCA Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification may be
more elaborate, but comes to the same definition, a matter to be
left to another time.

Conclusion

The signatories to the Agreement were fully aware of the his-
toric differences among themselves and agreed to accept each
other’s positions without correction. What was once considered
false doctrine by one party or the other is now understood as “mu-
tual misunderstanding and misrepresentation” and “complementary
rather than contradictory.” In this new situation, Lutheran and Re-
formed doctrines are considered traditions, that is, they are historic
beliefs with no necessary binding significance for contemporary
churches. Confessions have no more value than other historical
documents.

The ELCA-Reformed alliance is not without precedent.
Lutheran churches have gone out of existence by putting other doc-
uments or arrangements in the place of the Lutheran Confessions.
Sasse saw the Prussian Union (1817) as the most notorious, but he
also saw the formation of the Evangelical Church in Germany
(1948) as an umbrella organization in the same light. This was
taken one step further by the Leuenberg Concord, a foundation
document for the Agreement, which claimed that the historic
Lutheran and Reformed positions on the Lord’s Supper simply rep-
resented different strands of the New Testament.” By effectively
putting Reformed and Lutheran Confessions on a par in the Agree-
ment, the ELCA has changed and denied its confessional base and
has ceased to be Lutheran in both a confessional and a historic
sense. This is in keeping with the global unionism embraced and
advocated by the Lutheran World Federation’s ecumenical program
of “Reconciled Diversity” (1977): the various churches enter into
full communion with one another while keeping their former con-
fessions—minus the condemnations. Did theologians invent “post-
modernism” before it became a secular fashion?

David P. Scaer, Chairman
Kurt E. Marquart

Richard E. Muller, Secretary
William C. Weinrich, Adjunct
Lawrence R. Rast Jr., Adjunct

Endnotes

1. Donald H. Yoder outlines some of these efforts in “Lutheran-
Reformed Union Proposals, 1800-1850: An Experiment in Ecu-
menics,” Bulletin of the Theological Seminary of the Evangelical
and Reformed Church 17 (January 1946): 39-77.

Johann Probst’s argument in Die Wiedervereinigung der
Lutheraner und Reformirten [sic] (Allentown, Pa.: H. Ebner, 1826)

2001 Convention Workbook

is strikingly reminiscent of the Agreement’s perspective. He writes:
“To Christian people in general it is all the same over what other
dogmas the preachers of former days quarreled in their publica-
tions. Such writings can only be of interest to scholars. All the old
confessional writings have been brought about through particularly
grievous and troublesome circumstances and are likewise with time
become obsolete and have only historical value.” Cited in Vergilius
Ferm, The Crisis in American Lutheran Theology (New York: The
Century Company, 1927), 48.

2. The Agreement assumes that a doctrinal consensus was
achieved in A Common Calling: The Witness of Our Reformation
Churches in North America Today (March 1992). Also cited in the
Agreement as authoritative are An Invitation to Action (1981-
1983), the Leuenberg Concord, and Marburg Revisited (1962-
1966). Marburg was the site where Luther refused the hand of fel-
lowship to Zwingli and is symbolic of the traditional Lutheran
resistance to communion with the Reformed. The title Marburg Re-
visited suggests that this resistance has been overcome. The Leuen-
berg Concord claimed doctrinal unity among the established
Lutheran and Reformed churches of Europe.

3. The Agreement acknowledges “the differing ‘accents’ of
Calvin and Luther on the relation of the church and word, Law and
Gospel, the ‘two kingdoms.’ and the sovereignty of Christ.” For
Barth, as for Zwingli, the Law is very much a form of the Gospel.

4. See, for example, The Four Visitation Articles of 1592,
which has separate sections on ‘The False and Erroneous Doctrines
of the Calvinists” on the Lord’s Supper, the Person of Christ, Bap-
tism and Predestination and Providence of God. Friedrich Bente,
“Historical Introduction,” in Concordia Triglotta: The Symbolical
Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, German-Latin-English
(St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), 192, 217, 1150-57.

5. Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans-
lated by Douglas Horton (New York: Harper, 1957), 229-230.

6. This has long been the position of the General Synod branch
of American Lutheranism. Milton Valentine writes under the head-
ing “The Augsburg Confession Only”(“‘The General Synod,” in
The Distinctive Doctrines and Usages of the General Bodies of the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States, 3rd edition
(Philadelphia: The Lutheran Publication Society, 1903, 41):

“The General Synod does not include in its confessional basis
any of the other writings that have been, to greater or less extent,
accepted as doctrinal standards in some places, such as The Apol-
ogy to the Augsburg Confession, Luther’s Larger Catechism, the
Smalkald Articles, and especially the Formula Concordiae.”

What is noteworthy in the case of the General Synod, though, is
its militant attitude against the other confessions. About the Augs-
burg Confession itself, Valentine says “That in the differences of
understanding and explanation that have always marked the inter-
pretation of some of its statements, undisturbed liberty shall be en-
joyed” (47).

This is not surprising, however, when one considers the posi-
tion of Samuel Schmucker, the nineteenth-century American
Lutheran. He argued that only the Augustana was to be subscribed
to, and only insofar as it confessed the fundamental articles of the
Christian faith in a manner substantially correct. Schmucker also
claimed that because many Lutherans had never subscribed to the
other symbolical books, they could therefore not be considered
confessionally binding.

See “The Doctrinal Basis and Ecclesiastical Position of the
American Lutheran Church,” in The American Lutheran Church,
Historically, Doctrinally, and Practically Delineated, 155-246
(Springfield, Ohio: D. Harbaugh, 1851).

Of note is the significant step back from the position of
Schmucker and Valentine by J. A. Singmaster. See “The Gencral
Synod,” in The Distinctive Doctrines and Usages of the General
Bodies of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States,