LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2004, Page 425

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

⤓ Download .txt · copy text

THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS 425

The bureaucratic implementation of the “certification” require-
ments for ordination and “rostering” requirements for a Call would
seem to invite ever-changing and ever-expanding requirements for
continuing education. Creative conclusions can be drawn from
what is not said in this section even while its implications can be
expanded into newly binding mandates. This can only empower the
centralized “certifying and rostering” authority and its auditing
agency at the expense of congregations and their pastors as these
requirements are defined and detailed for actual practice.

To mandate continuing education by imposing, for example, a
requirement defined in terms of completing a minimum number of
Continuing Educational Credits (CEUs) every five years, could
have the effect of forcing a congregation into a dilemma: depose
its pastor, or renegotiate its fellowship arrangement with other con-
gregations.

In reality, continuing education already occurs in many ways—
not all of them measurable or certifiable by some auditing bureau-
cracy. A pastor may complete a doctoral dissertation in five years
while receiving no “continuing educational credits” for this effort.
The oldest form of continuing education (and perhaps least appre-
ciated in our own day) is the pastor’s library—the books he buys,
reads, and studies. C. F. W. Walther certainly agreed that “contin-
ued study is a major aspect of a preacher’s life,”>? and encouraged
supervisors to inspect the pastor’s library as a regular part of their
visitation duties.

Regular visitation is the best possible form of “ongoing evalua-
tion,” and was wholeheartedly endorsed and encouraged by
Walther, following the historical examples of Luther and
Melanchthon. Visitation is the primary theological justification (by
human rather than divine obligation) for establishing the office of
superintendent, visitor, bishop or District President—all titles for
the same office.

To summarize, any mandates by the Synod or its Districts of
continuing education requirements for pastors could easily under-
mine the permanence of the Divine Call and prove, therefore, the-
ologically unjustifiable.

Selection and the Extending of a Call

Through whom does God cail?* Historically, it is not accurate
to say that in Walther’s day “congregations were not to disregard
recommendations of the District President.”*4 The first constitution
of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod™ clearly stated, “Jf a
congregation applies to Synod for a pastor, it shall suggest candi-
dates.” This conditional statement had meaning only “if” the con-
gregation decided to apply to the Synod for help in its calling
process. Otherwise, congregations could call any pastor in the syn-
odical fellowship by sending a letter directly to the pastor.

Walther’s lengthy essay “The Congregation’s Right to Choose
Its Own Pastor” was written precisely to underscore this point.
Without a clear “thus saith the Lord,” congregations most certainly
do have the God-given freedom to choose something other than
following the recommendations of those outside the congregation
(including the District President of Missourian polity*). This pre-
vents external manipulation of the call process for political pur-
poses.

How should names be solicited or nominated? In a voluntary
synodical fellowship, no outside person can forbid the congrega-
tion from considering any candidate it wishes to call.*’ They can
assemble their own list of candidates and extend a call. Current
Missourian polity requires congregations only to “consult” with
their District President, not to solicit names from him, and certainly
not to obtain his approval of every candidate. Encroaching institu-
tional interests could easily usurp this prerogative when the con-
gregation does not defend and exercise it.

If synodical officials have put a candidate on “suspended” or
“restricted” status, the congregation will want to know and con-

sider that information. It must be emphasized that the congrega-
tion’s decision not to call such an individual is undertaken volun-
tarily along with membership in the synodical fellowship. Both
congregations and pastors benefit from the existence and use of
such a “restricted” status. It helps to ensure that persons accused
(but not convicted) of serious crimes (such as pedophiles, adulter-
ers, or persons with a propensity to assault) will not be transferred
to an unsuspecting congregation.

The Specific Contents of the Call

Open-Ended vs. Temporary Calls

Limiting the duration treats the Divine Call as a mere contract.
While Lutherans do not recognize either the man (pastor) or the of-
fice as “means of grace,” an imposed limitation upon the Call’s
tenure nonetheless begins to obscure those means. Since the office
of the Holy Ministry is nothing other than preaching, teaching, ad-
ministering the Sacraments, and exercising the Keys (see AC
V-XIV), to limit the tenure of the office’s incumbent is to limit the
means themselves.*®

After presenting a fine summary of the positions of Walther,

' Pieper, and earlier Lutheran theologians, the Commission’s Report

speculates: “It may well be the case, that the length of service, like
location and salary, is also an issue that is entrusted to the church to
administer ‘by human right’ (de jure humano).”*? This moves well
beyond the limited reasons for which a pastor may be removed
from office, and certainly has no solid footing in the CTCR Re-
port’s preceding historical review.

Marquart explains why subjecting “time of service” to human
“administration” should be considered incompatible with the Di-
vine Call:

Freedom from arbitrary human interference and control is of the
essence of the divine call. A “temporary call” is simply a human con-
tract with the built-in right of dismissal on unbiblical grounds. It is anal-
ogous to a “trial marriage,” which may or may not be renewed upon ex-
piration of the set term. Rejection of such frivolities has always been a
hallmark of the Lutheran understanding of the “proper call” (or-
dentlicher Beruf, rite vocatus, AC XIV). See Robert Preus (1991). The
Smalcald Articles (III/X/II) appeal to the provision of canon law that
“those ordained even by heretics shall be considered ordained and re-
main [so].” Historically the Missouri Synod has always regarded free-
dom from arbitrary time limits as an essential feature of the “proper
call” of AC XIV, and this understanding was constitutionally en-
trenched for over a century.”

Lutherans have experimented with temporary calls before. A
nineteenth-century Missouri Synod theologian put those incidents
in historical context:

This temporary calling is a shameful perversion of the order which

Christ Himself has created in the church. Nowhere is it revealed as the
will of God that preachers and teachers should be so engaged that it de-
pends on the good will and the decision of the other whether they may
remain in their office or not. In the most ancient church one therefore
finds not a trace of such temporary employment. This vice arose only at
the time of the Reformation, when some congregations misused the
doctrine of the spiritual priesthood [Luther strongly objected].

As a result of this decided opposition to the excesses of congrega-
tions, we hear no more of such attempts in the Lutheran church for a
long time. Only at the time of the Interim, 1547-52, several south-Ger-
man imperial cities began again to call their preachers for a certain num-
ber of years, and retained the contract system, even through the emer-
gency was ended by the Passau Treaty in 1552. On Opinion of the
Wittenberg Faculty in respect of a school-cantor, from the year 1638,
reads: “The calls to church and school services, in which one is to give
the other a quarter year’s notice without any other weighty cause, are
entirely disapproved in our Lutheran churches” (Consil. Theol. Witeb.
IH, 55). ... As a result of such forceful testimonies against it, the tem-
porary call disappeared again from Germany, but arose again about 200
years later in America. But also here the Saxons, who had immigrated
50 years ago, raised their voice against it, and showed the limits of con-
gregational rights in call matters, and maintained what we still teach

2004 Convention Workbook