Why I Became a Lutheran

I thought this might interest a few people: my personal journey to the LCMS.

I was raised in an evangelical (Baptistic) church. However, as my intellect awakened during my college years, one aspect of evangelicalism began to make me uneasy: the nearly exclusive focus on the subjective and experiential. I knew that my Christianity must stand on firmer ground than that. I must know that Christianity is objectively true, no matter what I feel or seem to experience with my limited sense. Not until then does the subjective response find a place. Emotive response follows a deep understanding of doctrinal truth; certainly both are important, but it seems to me that the intellectual foundations are being ignored in favor of “fuzzy feelings for Jesus,” as a friend of mine puts it.

In my personal experience, I sat in church Sunday after Sunday wondering what was wrong with my emotions, especially when I heard a guilt-inducing tirade chastising us for not loving Jesus enough. Only when God opened my eyes to the fact that my intellect was the channel for informing my heart was I able to have such an emotional response as I desired. I knew I had found the “missing piece” in my Christianity. No longer do I seek for an emotional experience; I know this follows naturally when I hear God’s Word proclaimed in all its glory.

I once heard a sermon by (Presbyterian) Dr. Cairns in which he attacked the highly subjective “what does this verse mean to you?” way of handling Biblical text. “With all due respect,” he shouted, “I don’t care what the verse means to you!” We need to care about the context, the original intent, and objective meaning of the text. Only then can the verse present a proper application to the Christian. Always, a red flag goes up when I hear someone say, “God showed me this,” or “God gave me this song,” as if God whispered in his ear. Then I listen carefully to determine whether he will quote some verse wildly out of context.

Paul praised the Berean Christians who weighed everything they were taught against the objective, written Word of God “to see whether these things were true.” One must always be careful to make the distinction between the speaker's opinion and what actually comes from the Word (assuming Biblical literacy). A great deal of what passes for “devotional writing,” even in the 19th century classics, contains so much opinion, so many tear-jerking tales, and so little doctrine that I will not bother with them. I would rather read the “dry” books by Van Til and Luther and C. F. W. Walther. These books delight with their doctrinal truth, logic and scholarship. (See Kindred Spirits post dealing with Dionysian/Apollonian art.)

Ultimately, the movement known as “pietism” which crept through the Lutheran church in the 1700’s (and found its fullest expression in John Wesley and the consequent growth of Evangelicalism), with its great emphasis on the subjective and personal, subtly undermined the objective foundation of the Word in the minds of many believers. I say subtly, because most of these believers still overtly claim Sola Scriptura as their guiding light.

Yet, many believers are not trained to study the Bible carefully with regard to important literary considerations, such as historical background and context, but rather view the Bible as a horoscope-like, esoteric “guide” from which they take their “verse for the day.” Thus, a great many evangelicals are pathetically confused as to the true teachings of the Word. This happens easily when the words of the Bible are separated from the spirit in which they were intended. I found in conservative Lutheranism a high view of the Bible, which included great respect for good scholarship that handles the Word in a proper manner.

Historic Lutheranism maintains an attitude of proper disdain for poorly educated “clergy” whose sloppy scholarship treats God’s Word in a flippant manner. I believe this is as it should be. I fully appreciate the level of training the LCMS demands of its clergy, and I rejoice in the honest servants of God who have labored long and hard to understand the original languages and historical context of the Bible, who are “apt to teach” and pass their knowledge on to us laypeople.

I believe that God would have us love Him with “all our hearts, all our souls, all our strength, and all our minds,” and that any form of education in worship and art must of necessity reach the whole person. We must not merely manipulate the emotions, not merely feed the intellect, but rather keep all things in balance.

Announcing a Great Accomplishment

A friend of mine, Philip Larson, is celebrating the attainment of an advanced degree, a Doctor of Education (or Ed.D.) in Curriculum and Instruction.

It is now appropriate to refer to him as Dr. Larson.

Hooray! Congratulations!!!!!

Dr. Philip Larson is Head of Secondary Authors (Product Development) at the Bob Jones University Press in Greenville, South Carolina. He titled his dissertation in curriculum theory A Transformational Model of Biblical Integration with Curricular Applications. I started reading last night, and it’s very exciting stuff—a groundbreaking study for Christian thinkers and educators everywhere. His comments regarding the work:

Folks talk about "biblical integration" or the "integration of faith and life," but there is little definition of these expressions. In the 19 years I taught in Christian schools, I cannot recall anyone saying what it was, yet everyone agreed that it was a sine qua non.

I was coming from Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture, despite some claims that he is out of date. Niebuhr advocates a transformational approach to culture. Niebuhr was taken to be especially critical of Anabaptist, Lutheran, and Thomist viewpoints. However, contemporary Anabaptists have been able to tweak Niebuhr's scheme in a way that transformational folks would generally approve, and it appears that Lutherans have done the same (although Gene Veith is quite an exception).

Transformationally, I'm defining biblical integration as "the unreserved affirmation of the Bible's authority and the vigorous expansion of its influence in a given academic or cultural endeavor."

The model graphic is a very abbreviated version of what I'm trying to say. I see three components of culture (nothing novel here): stuff you can touch (tools, including virtual tools), social practices, and social ideals. Presumably everything in culture fits in one of these three categories. In this model, a Level 3 situation exists when discourse can easily switch between the three loci. Unfortunately, we don't have many situations in which people can easily move the discourse between artifacts, social practices, and social ideals. I can't tell you a school system at Level Three; perhaps I'm mistaken.

At Level 3, a metanarrative will coordinate every aspect of the discourse. As a Christian, I suggest that Creation-Fall-Redemption is the biblical metanarrative. So if we can teach our students so that they learn to see everything in terms of these three lenses, we will have done them a great service.

At Level 2, social ideals are reified and pass into the background, yet participants remain serious about social practices such as mathematics, music, literature, etc. What many regard as excellent education fits in this level.

At Level 1, social practices are reified and only artifacts/virtual artifacts remain. In such a mathematics class, the teacher and students would largely focus on algorithms and processes without attending to their purposes and bases. Musically, one would hit all the right notes and perhaps miss the point of the music. Some regard this as excellent education, but it's too focused on rote.

Kindred Spirits: Blog Alert

I stumbled across a great blog yesterday called Kirchenlieder (Church Songs). If you enjoy the content of Kirchenmusik (Church Music), you'll want to take a look. It's not as philosophical as Religious Affections, but the author (Lance Peeler) definitely shares my aesthetics. Speaking of Religious Affections, the latest post on the site really held my interest. Scott Aniol discusses two types of art distinguished by aethetists: Dionysian vs. Apollonarian art. To quote Mr. Aniol:

Both Dionysus and Apollo were mythological Greek gods associated with art. Apollo was the god of reason and logic, and was considered the god of music since the Greeks thought of good music as a great expression of order and patterns (a la Pythagorus and Plato). Dionysus, on the other hand, was the god of wine and revelry, and was worshiped with loud, raucous music accompanied by pipes and drums.

So Dionysian art/music communicates to the raw passions, while Apollonarian art communicates (ultimately) to the emotions through the intellect. He quotes from Daniel Reuning of Concordia, who points specifically to the music of Lutheran tradition as Apollonarian.

His intention in writing is to help the Christian distinguish between mere emotional experience and true worship, which addresses the whole person and not merely the emotions.

While I do not share or endorse Mr. Aniol's entire theology, I have learned a great deal from his writing and I do not hesitate to share this valuable resource.

What Does It Mean to Be a Lutheran? Part I

This is part of an article written by my former pastor, Dr. Hunsicker of Christ Lutheran Church in Abbotsford, Wisconsin. I'll be posting more later.

To make the answer as simple as possible, a Lutheran is someone who believes that Jesus is the only source of salvation for sinful mankind. Faith in Jesus saves. When you believe in Jesus you acknowledge that your faith is a gift of God (Eph. 2:8-9) and that you are the recipient of God’s grace, His forgiveness, and His guarantee of heaven through trust in His Son Jesus. Lutherans believe that God is the One Who receives all credit for the ability to believe, all credit for forgiveness, and is to receive all credit and glory for eternal life. Man is the recipient of God’s gifts and is to respond in thankfulness for God’s salvation by a life lived according to God’s Word just as the Israelites were to live in response to God’s salvation from Egypt (Exodus 20, the context of the Commandments).

Lutherans also believe that the Bible is God’s Word cover to cover. This means that we believe in a six-day, twenty-four-hour-day creation and we reject evolution. It means that Noah was real, the flood was real, and that the fossils we find around today were alive at the time of Noah. We believe the miracles of Jesus are real. We believe that Jesus died and physically rose from the dead and bodily ascended into heaven where He remains until He returns to judge the living and the dead. We believe that every word of the Bible was inspired by God the Holy Spirit in their original autographs, that is, as they were originally written by the prophets and apostles.

We believe that our human thinking, human wisdom, is to be subservient to the Word of God and it is not to interpret the Word of God. The Word stands by itself as truth whether we understand it or not. Those who interpret Scripture based upon tradition or upon human reason do damage to the Word of God and to faith in Jesus. Scripture is to be read and understood in the context of a sentence within a paragraph within a book of the Bible within the historical and cultural context in which the Holy Spirit inspired any particular sentence to be written or communicated. The Bible interprets itself based on what the Holy Spirit inspired at other times and places.

Defense of Proper Education for Those Who Minister in the Church, Part V

Those who prefer good intentions to competence always ask, “Is it not true that clever men are more likely to be untrustworthy?” hoping to instill a distrust of higher learning.

How many times do we find ourselves in the position of having to trust someone more intelligent or better informed—shall we say, an expert—than ourselves? We consult doctors, lawyers and accountants for matters requiring specialized knowledge that is beyond the ability of the common person to completely understand—how much more the ancient document recorded in foreign languages that most of us only glance at a few minutes out of each day? Ultimately we must trust in someone of superior knowledge; we have the responsibility of choosing wisely the object of that trust. (God does not require a blind faith; we exercise a faith grounded in reality and truth. There are always clues to guide our choices; faith simply bridges the gap between our experience and our hope.)

Anti-intellectuals often observe that we live in a culture where seminaries are becoming increasingly disrespectful in their approach to the Word and apostate.

Hypocrisy, lies, or false teaching do not change what is and will always be true. The responsibility lies with the student and his mentors to determine the underlying suppositions of his teachers, and to seek out teachers who respect the divine inspiration of the Holy Bible. It goes without saying that not all seminaries are apostate!

Christians are called to be in the world (though not of it) and to be salt and light in whatever environment they find themselves.

A common misconception is that Christian ideals are at odds with academic ambition. Are we not to love the Lord with all our minds? No anti-intellectual culture could have produced a J. S. Bach, a Milton or a Kepler. They made a point of casting their crowns before Christ and dedicating the fruits of their minds to His service. Again, Paul exhorts Timothy to “study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed.” Surely it is God Who grants gifts of the mind, and He expects us to invest our talents wisely.

Does not God show His glory (and therefore work better) through weakness?

The attainment of an advanced degree does not prevent any person from being a “weak vessel.” We make a faulty assumption when we imply otherwise.

2 Corinthians 12:9 "And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me."

Notice who is saying this: someone we all too frequently assume was “strong,” a highly educated man and master of theology: the Apostle Paul, who had the ancient-world equivalent of a Ph. D. Why does he call himself weak? Was God not able to use his education in a mighty way? History demonstrates that God used every painfully acquired skill Paul was able to bring—from skilled debate and passionate persuasion in the public square to the humble trade of tentmaking. And yet Paul calls himself weak, and so he was, being human and subject to like passions as we are, but he also knew the undergirding of God’s strength. God, in His infinite wisdom, saw to it that the greatest missionary of the first century was adequately prepared for the work.

The teaching of God’s Word must be held in high esteem and those who essay to teach it must be held highly accountable for their handling. The Word must be understood in its original intent, its absolutely objective meaning; must be handled seriously as a historic document inspired by a Holy God. It is a serious undertaking that requires the best linguistic and research skills developed by human civilization. Any careless, lighthearted approach is an insult to our God and the Christian faith, not to say damaging to Christ’s beloved flock.

Remember Christ’s test of Peter’s love for Him: “If you love Me, feed my sheep.” Sheep were not merely bumbling, clumsy creatures; they were and are the main form of wealth in the Middle East. When Christ calls his people sheep, He implies that they are precious to him in the same way sheep were valuable to their owners. We cannot make the mistake of thinking that any old fodder will do for these sheep. We may be sure that “hirelings” will give account to Christ along with the faithful pastors.