Christians today are concerned with one central issue: Where in the world is God?  How can I be reassured of his love in the face of the complexities and traumas of my life?…the historic answer of the heirs of the reformation has been: in the gospel.  Modern Evangelicals, however, do not see the gospel as the means of applying the love of God to the sinner as much as they see it as information about the love of God.  The gospel is understood to be an “offer of grace,” rather than the “application of grace.”  It has no power itself, the power is in your decision to accept it.

In contrast, the Lutheran church has always stressed that the gospel is both the offer of grace and the means of its application.  After dealing with the central doctrine of justification by grace through faith, that is, that God will consider our faith in Jesus as righteousness, the Augsburg Confession turns immediately to the application of salvation:

To obtain such faith God instituted the office of the ministry, that is, provided the gospel and the sacraments. Through these, as through means, he gives the Holy Spirit, who works faith, when and where he pleases, in those who hear the gospel. And the gospel teaches that we have a gracious God, not by our own merits but by the merit of Christ, when we believe this. (Augsburg Confession: Article V. “The Office of the Ministry”)

….Evangelical Christians today tend to see the gospel as mere historical data. Accordingly, if you want to take advantage of this information you do it by making a decision to commit yourself to Jesus. The Bible has a dramatically different view; here the shoe is on the other foot. God takes the initiative, just as he did in the incarnation of his Son.

The gospel is not just historical information, but the living power of the living God. Jesus said: “The words which I have spoken to you are Spirit and they are life” (John 6:63). No wonder then that Paul saw the gospel not as a static message but as life-giving power: “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16).

From Sanctification: Christ in Action by Harold L. Senkbeil, Milwaukee: Northwestern, 1989, pp. 166-7.

Can we please stop doing this?

In the wider Protestant world, the term “Reformed” specifically means “Calvinist.” In some circles, the word “Reformed” is even narrower than that – it refers to a specific type of confessional Calvinist.  So when I hear Lutherans referring to American evangelicals (and even Pentecostals/charismatics) as “Reformed”, I cringe a little bit.  Most of those folks are not Calvinists by any stretch of the imagination, and will not hesitate to let you know that.  And I cringe more than a little bit when Lutherans say “the Reformed believe X” when X is a belief that only an American evangelical – and no confessional Calvinist – would actually hold.

I understand why Lutherans use the term in such a broad way.  Sometimes it’s for the sake of convenience when we are speaking among ourselves, as simply using the term “Protestant” to refer only to Calvinists and Arminians and not Lutherans can be confusing to some.  And historically, the non-Lutheran Protestant denominations ultimately – in one way or another – are theological descendants of the original Calvinists of the 16th century.

But neither of these reasons really excuse a practice that is generally unhelpful when one is actually interacting with Calvinists or Arminians.  At best it causes confusion and at worst it can cause unnecessary offense – to the point where the Calvinist or Arminian writes off you and Lutherans in general as being ignorant of what they really believe.

A while ago I was listening to a lecture on the two natures in Christ by Dr. Rod Rosenbladt of White Horse Inn fame, at the end of which (during a question and answer session) he takes Lutheran pastors and professors to task for their use of the word “Reformed” to refer to Wesleyan evangelicals (and conversely, for using the term “evangelical” to refer to Calvinists). Here’s some of what he (himself an LCMS pastor and professor) had to say:

If you’re in a wider Christian circle and you do what our LCMS pastors do – and they’ve been trained to do it – I’m going to be speaking to a group of them back in Minneapolis and I’m gonna tell them to repent of this – if you’re in front of a broad Christian group, and there are a lot of Calvinists there, and you call them evangelicals, they’ll be totally offended.  To them that means Arminian.  They might just walk out of the room because they think you’re an idiot – an uneducated idiot.  And correlatively, on the other side, if you have a large evangelical gathering and you call them Calvinists, their hands will be in the air and they’ll say “I am not – whatever I am, I’m not one of those.”…

So as you say “evangelical” today, it usually means Arminian/Wesleyan….When you say “Reformed”, it means one thing, and only one thing – 120 proof Calvinism.  Now we even have in our books in the LCMS guys – professors – who use (or have used) the word “Reformed” to mean everybody who isn’t Lutheran or Roman Catholic.  Disaster.  Disaster.  We’ve got to stop doing that.  I talk to seminarians – they still blunder into it – and so I try as politely as I can to say, “You want to distinguish those.”  Because if you’re speaking in a broader Christian audience, you want to be precise about that, or you’ll have no idea why fifty percent of the room packs up its briefcases and walks out the back door.  But they will.

Noll states early on:

The book’s main narrative describes a shift away from European theological traditions, descended directly from the Protestant Reformation, toward a Protestant evangelical theology decisively shaped by its engagement with Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America.  It is not an exaggeration to claim that this nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicalism differed from the religion of the Protestant Reformation as much as sixteenth-century Reformation Protestantism differed from the Roman Catholic theology from which it emerged (p.3).

So why was this the case?  How did Christian theology develop in the early United States of America, and why did it develop in the specific way that it did?  Noll answers that question by postulating a particularly American synthesis of “evangelical Protestant religion, republican political ideology, and commonsense moral reasoning” (p. 9).

1. Evangelical Protestant religion.  The religious landscape of the early United States came to be dominated by Protestant evangelicals who “shared an emphasis on conversion, the supreme religious authority of the Bible, and an active life of personal holiness” (p. 11)  These Protestants were also highly influenced by the revivalism that swept through the colonies in the 18th century.

2. Republican political ideology.  An almost unique feature of American thought is the idea that Christianity and a republican form of government are compatible.  To this day in America, one is assumed to fit with the other, hand in glove. But this has not at all been the case outside the United States – in fact, in the eighteenth century “almost all observers outside the United States assumed that republican thinking contradicted the principles of traditional religion” (p. 54).

3. Commonsense moral reasoning.  American Christians in the late 18th to the early 19th century had come to rely on “common sense” to determine truth in matters of theology and ethics.  “In the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, almost all Americans, especially Christian ministers who ventured into print, relied strategically on the weight of ‘self-evident truths’ or ‘intuitive truths,’ even as they expressed repeatedly the conviction that ‘the best reason which anyone can have for believing any proposition is that it is so evident to his intellectual faculty that he cannot disbelieve it’” (p. 95).  This was a departure from traditional Protestant ways of thinking that were much more suspicious of autonomous human reason.

Noll discusses the various historical and religious factors that led to this unique American synthesis, not the least of which is the fact that Puritan revivalism had the unintended effect of undermining the traditional link between church and society and paved the way for republican ideas to fill the vacuum.  He goes on to describe in great detail how the American synthesis shaped Calvinism and Methodism (two dominant religious traditions) in America.  The story of the Americanization of Calvinism (which was really the Americanization of Puritanism) was especially intriguing.  It shed a great deal of light on a puzzling question that I had been pondering for some time: how did Presbyterianism produce a Pelagian like Charles Finney?  The answer in a nutshell is that American “commonsense reasoning” led Calvinism in America down a slippery slope that eventually led to a practical Arminianism and ended in the denial of original sin altogether.  In the same way “commonsense reasoning” seemed to have led Methodism from its original emphasis on “prevenient grace” to a more fully Pelagian view.

Another fascinating aspect of the book was Noll’s treatment of how the American synthesis dealt with the issues underlying the Civil War.  The dominant hermeneutical grid used by Americans of the antebellum era to interpret the Bible was what Noll describes as a “Reformed, literal hermeneutic.”  Noll describes the Reformed nature of this hermeneutic (as opposed to hermeneutical principles employed by Lutherans and high Anglicans) as follows:

First, Calvinists appropriated the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura by perceiving the Bible as an authority set over against other religious authorities.  Second, Calvinists often practiced some version of the “Regulative Principle,” a position the English Puritans had developed from general Reformed leanings.  It held that believers were required to do what the Bible commands but were equally required not to do those things about which the Bible is silent.  Last was the so-called third use of the law, or the belief that, after its twofold use for restraining sin in society and for showing individuals their need of salvation, the moral teaching of Scriptures existed also (even primarily) to provide a blueprint for how Christians, in grateful obedience to God, should live their entire lives (p. 377).

He then describes the “literal” nature of the hermeneutic, which went beyond the Reformed Regulative Principle and could be better traced to American historical circumstances, particularly those that encouraged anti-traditionalism.  It was also very much tied to the idea of commonsense moral reasoning:

The assumption that people could see clearly and without ambiguity what the Bible said, and that this biblicistic knowledge qualified one to judge connections between moral cause and moral effect, was the common person’s counterpart to the Enlightenment confidence displayed by intellectual elites who employed learned formal moral philosophy to the same ends.  Democratic biblicism undercut trust in traditional interpretations of Scripture with the same force that they were being leveled by a reliance on philosophical common sense.  In both cases, confidence in present abilities overmastered confidence in what was handed on from the past.  In both cases, a liberated modern self was the starting point for biblical interpretation (p. 381).

Noll goes on to describe how the Civil War shattered the near-universality of this hermeneutic in America and presented an insurmountable challenge to the American synthesis itself, since pro-slavery arguments drew directly on the “Reformed, literal hermeneutic” and one had to step outside this interpretive framework in order to argue against slavery.   Yet to step outside this framework was unthinkable for many.  Evangelical Protestants saw the Reformed/literal approach to Scripture as having been validated by its success in evangelizing the nation and achieving widespread social transformation, and it was inextricably linked to republican ideals.  But the same interpretive principles that led to Christian republicanism and fueled revivalism also led to arguments for the enslavement of a particular ethnic group in America.

I found this book to be very enlightening as to the historical reasons why Americans think in the ways that they do about politics and religion, even into the 21st century.  The American synthesis and the Reformed, literal interpretation of Scripture no longer dominated American thought after the Civil War, but in conservative Protestant circles they certainly seem to have persisted, sometimes very strongly.  American evangelicals by and large do not see how much their theology has been influenced by the unique twists and turns of American history.  When I was growing up, a mostly-Arminian sort of revivalism was all I knew.  To me that was Christianity, and there were no other categories: there were Catholics, there were liberals (which included most Protestant denominations except conservative Baptists) and then there were Christians.  My church was a “Bible church” because we just believed the Bible, not like all those denominations out there that held to creeds and confessions.  Patriotic holidays would be celebrated in church and no one would blink an eye.  There seemed to be no question in anyone’s mind that the founding fathers had intended America to be a Christian nation and that America was in some sense special in God’s eyes.  The end of America meant the end of the world, literally.

As I eventually learned, things were not so simple.  But things make a lot more sense now.  My eyes were opened to a Christianity far more ancient than American revivalism long before I read America’s God.  But this book helped me to better understand the origins of the Christianity that was made in America, and to better understand how the current American theological landscape came to be.  If you have the patience, it is well worth the read.

…the religious history of the late-colonial period, particularly the Great Awakening and its effects….is a story of unintended consequences.  Leaders of the Awakening – from Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts, Joseph Bellamy in rural Connecticut, Gilbert Tennent in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Samuel Davies in Virginia, to George Whitefield, who went everywhere – knew what they were after when they enlisted affective rhetoric to preach about intractable human depravity and supernal divine grace.  They were trying to reawaken the church for the sake of the church itself, to reassert the sovereignty of God’s divine love in conversion, to exalt the substitutionary, penal work of Christ as God’s way of reconciliation with sinners, to demonstrate the necessity of conversion as a prerequisite for truly virtuous living, and by these means to check the worldliness promoted by the era’s new forms of commerce and entertainment.  Yet the pursuit of such goals had ironic consequences.  The awakeners preached a higher, more spiritual vision of the church, yet the result was decline in the very notion of church and a transfer of religious commitment from the church to the nation.  They focused on God’s role in conversion yet brought about an exaltation of human activity in the process of salvation.  They preached a traditional doctrine of the atonement yet opened the way toward redefining the work of Christ as an outworking of governmental relationships rather than the assuagement of God’s wrath.  They rooted true virtue in supernatural conversion yet created conditions for a new concept of virtuous living as in principle available to every person by nature alone.

From Mark A. Noll, America’s God, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 13-14.

However, the post – and even more so the subsequent comments – illustrates the sometimes unhealthy tendency in American evangelicalism to focus on “what’s happening inside my heart” rather than on “what happened outside of me” – as well as the rather unhealthy (in my opinion) Reformed and evangelical tendency to see repentance and faith as a one-time event, “crossing the starting line” if you will.

I tried to post a comment over at the blog but for some reason it was swallowed up into the void twice (even though I was well under 2000 characters!) so I’ll reproduce my comment here:

As a Lutheran who used to be an evangelical, I think looking inside oneself in any way for assurance of salvation will always place that assurance out of reach.

It’s interesting how “once-saved-always-saved,” “eternal security”, or “perseverance of the saints,” whatever one wants to call it, is used to try to bring comfort to people by saying they can never fall away.  Yet the qualifier is “IF their faith is real.”  For it to be any comfort, one has to know whether or not they have true saving faith.

I spent years and years on the rat-wheel of morbid introspection, trying to figure out whether my repentance was really sincere enough, whether I had surrendered my life to God enough, or whether I had enough good works to prove I was a true Christian and my faith was real.

It was only when I discovered that the Gospel was entirely outside of me – through Christ’s perfect life lived in my place, and in His death on the cross for every one of my sins, even ones I committed just today or that I commit repeatedly – that I found any sort of peace.  I discovered that the Christian life is one of daily repentance and faith in Christ alone, not a “crossing the starting line into true saving faith that you can never lose.”  Instead of worrying about whether I am “truly converted”, every day is a day of repentance and faith in Christ, nourished by the hearing of God’s word and the receiving of His Sacraments.  He is the one that creates and sustains our faith to the end through His means of grace.  The date that I “got saved” matters very little to me.  All I know is that I am baptized into Christ, that He put His name on me and that I belong to Him.

I think it is wrong to tell people to focus on their faith rather than on the Object of their faith – Jesus Christ and Him crucified for their sins.

The many comments on the post from folks struggling with the assurance of their salvation, and the well-meaning attempts of others to point them to their works and experiences in order to get that assurance brought back a lot of unhappy memories for me.  The comments along the lines of “I-thought-I-was-saved-for-twenty-years-but-found-out-I-wasn’t-and-then-God-REALLY-saved-me-by-giving-me-an-experience-of-REAL-repentance/surrender” brought back even more bad memories, of the sense I had towards the end of my days in evangelicalism that I was unwanted by God and there was nothing I could do about it.  He apparently wanted others, because He gave THEM an experience of true repentance/surrender that led to minimal struggle with sin and complete assurance of salvation…but He must not have wanted me, because He gave me no such gift.

The objective promise of Baptism – that through it God forgives my sins and applies to me the benefits of His death and resurrection – led me to the conclusion that God DID want me.  It is rooted in Scripture that God wanted me.  The words of Christ and of His apostles all said: “This is for you.”  Period.  Not, “this is for you IF your faith is real.” Just “this is for you.”  Such an objective promise leads to faith.

As an illustration: sometimes I really struggle with the sin of apathy.  There are days when I find myself completely indifferent to the things of God.  The Reformed-leaning evangelical answer to this problem might be: “Maybe your faith is not real.  You should perhaps question whether or not you are really a Christian and really have true saving faith.”

The Lutheran answer to this problem is different: “Your apathy is a sin against God.  But Christ died even for that sin.  Repent and believe that His forgiveness is for you.”  Instead of hearing that my sin disqualifies me from being a real Christian, I see God smiling down at me saying, “I forgive you even for that sin.  Return to Me.”

Every week I rack up enough sins to earn me eternal punishment thousands of times over (and I’m probably understating that).  Yet every week in the Divine Service I hear God’s word to me – “I forgive you even for those sins.  Repent and return to Me.  Look to the cross, where I suffered and died for you.  I put My name on you in Baptism.  I give you My true body and blood for the forgiveness of all your sins.  You are My beloved child.”

Because of the objective promises of God in Word and Sacrament I no longer have any doubt that God wanted me.  And still wants me.

How could I not love such a God?

Some of this actually sounds very familiar.

Mysticism has been practiced and promoted in American evangelical circles for years now. Thus the fact that certain segments of that population are now openly promoting Roman Catholic monastic mysticism is not terribly surprising to me. When I was an evangelical, mysticism was a big part of my spiritual life. I would have never in a million years have called it that. But looking back it seems clear and obvious.

When I was a young Christian in my late teens/early twenties I heard stories told by people in my church about their experiences of God speaking directly to them, and of the experiences they had of feeling the presence and love of God.  Various teachers that I listened to (which were looked upon with favor by my church) promoted the practice of reading the Bible in order to receive a direct message from God (while bypassing its meaning in context) – read until you come to a passage that pops out at you, and then meditate on it to see what God is saying to you personally.  The “Practice of the Presence of God” is something I am entirely familiar with because it got favorable mention at my church. I practiced journaling in such a way that I believed God was speaking to me directly through those means.  I used my imagination and my feelings in order to hear God speak to me.

An interesting side-effect of my discovery of the Reformation was that I stopped being a mystic.  The reasons why became clear later – reasons which make more puzzling and disturbing the fact that certain corners of the LCMS are now promoting such practices.

The beginning of the end of my mysticism came sometime back in the summer of 2008 when I read a particular article in Discipleship Journal.  Earlier that year, before discovering the White Horse Inn, I had subscribed to the evangelical magazine because of an ad that had promised to revitalize my walk with Christ and cure my spiritual dryness.  At the time I had never heard the word “pietism” but a few months later, devouring everything by Michael Horton and Rod Rosenbladt I could get my hands on, I realized that what I had been taught all my life could be described as a form of pietism – stressing inner experience above external promise.  And I discovered that “pietism” was a good word to describe much of what I was reading in this journal.

The author of the article wrote about how she felt like she was in a “spiritual wilderness” and how she longed for God to speak to her.  The Spirit supposedly led her to the Song of Solomon so that He could speak to her heart directly in what I would describe as a mystical experience.

Whereas previously I probably would have sought a similar sort of experience – such things weren’t foreign to me at all – now I found myself rather disturbed.  Where in Scripture does it promise that God will speak directly to our heart if we ask Him? And where in Scripture does it tell us that the Holy Spirit gives us “spiritual dry spells” so that He can lead us to be alone with Him in mystical experiences rather than convicting us of sin and leading us to repentance and faith?

The misuse of Scripture became rather obvious to me at this point.  It wouldn’t be long before I walked away from those kind of practices and never looked back.  When I discovered the external Word and Sacraments in Lutheranism it was the end of my mysticism.

All this made me wonder – why did I – or why does anyone – turn to mysticism in the first place?  What’s the appeal of it?  What drives a Christian to seek a direct experience of God?

At first I thought it was the a-sacramental nature of my evangelical beliefs. God did not have any objective means of coming to us, so naturally one might turn to mystical means in order to experience Him. But Roman Catholicism is replete with sacraments and still produces mystics galore.

The more I think about this, the more I think at least a large part of it has to do with assurance of salvation. For me the reasoning went something like this: if I can experience God directly, then I can know for sure that I am really His child and that He really has forgiven me.  If I can experience God directly, I can know that I really do have a personal relationship with Him and that He loves me personally.  I really believe that was my motivation for seeking God in such a manner.  In fact, many of my journal entries from that time bear that out.

The answer to the question of “how do I know I am a true believer?” became “because I felt God’s love and He speaks to me directly through His Word.”  It sounds innocuous but when evangelicals say “God spoke to me directly through His Word” they don’t necessarily mean “through the plain sense of the passage.” They often mean “reading my own experiences and feelings and desires into the words of Scripture, regardless of the context or plain sense of the passage.”  I vividly remember “hearing God speak directly to my heart” once using 2 Timothy 1:3-7.  I read this as a personal message from God.  Never mind that the passage was really about the Apostle Paul encouraging the young pastor Timothy – none of that mattered.  Mystical eisegesis was a small price to pay for gaining some glimmer of assurance that I was a true and sincere believer.  It must have been only the grace of God that kept me from more serious forms of error.

Like seeking such assurance through my daily obedience, such a method was bound to be a dead-end – and I inevitably discovered this.  The question always came up in my mind – how do I know all this isn’t just me talking to myself?  I grew increasingly uncomfortable using the Bible as a crystal ball.  The God that spoke to me through my journaling sounded suspiciously like me and didn’t know anything that I didn’t know.  And when I did not “hear” from God in this way it was personally devastating.  When I felt like God was speaking to me everything was fine.  But when I didn’t I wondered what God really thought about me and all the old fears about whether I was a true and sincere believer came flooding back.

When I discovered that the Gospel was entirely outside of me – and that He comes to us where He has promised to be, in the hearing of His Word and in the receiving of His Sacraments – everything changed.  I hear God’s Word confident that He is speaking plainly and that the Holy Spirit will use it to convict me of sin and point to Christ.  How do I know that I am really God’s child and that Christ’s perfect life and sacrificial death on the cross is really for me?  I am baptized into Christ and the name of the Triune God is upon me.  In my Baptism I have been buried and raised with Christ, washed in water with the Word.  How do I know that God forgives me even that sin? Because I hear from the lips of His called and ordained servant “I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”  How do I know that God wants me to be saved?  “Take, eat.  This is My body, which is for you.”  “Take, drink.  This cup is the new testament in My blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.”

So I can only think that those who promote mystical practices within the LCMS have lost confidence (if they ever had any to begin with) in the objective promises of God’s Word and Sacraments.  They are embracing and promoting a form of what used to be called “Enthusiasm.” Lutherans need to be aware of the dangers of such practices.  We need to cling to the words of Christ above our own feelings and experiences, regardless of how “spiritual” the latter may seem.

Part I
Part II
Part III

Many thanks to Pat and Ted at NRP for giving me this wonderful opportunity to share my story with a wider audience!

It has become the fashion to say that the difference between the
Reformed and the Lutheran Church consists in this, that the Reformed
Church “more exclusively” makes Scripture the source of the Christian
doctrine, while the Lutheran Church, being more deeply “rooted in the
past” and of a more “conservative” nature, accepts not only Scripture,
but also tradition as authoritative. But this is not in accord with
the facts. The history of dogma tells this story: In those doctrines in
which it differs from the Lutheran Church and for the sake of which it
has established itself as a separate body within visible Christendom,
the Reformed Church, as far as it follows in the footsteps of Zwingli
and Calvin, sets aside the Scripture principle and operates instead
with rationalistic axioms. The Reformed theologians frankly state that
reason must have a voice in determining Christian doctrine.

He goes on to quote Pieper regarding how rationalism affects the Reformed understanding of the means of grace generally, the Lord's Supper in particular, and the extent of the atonement.  As American evangelicalism is largely the legacy of those who came after Calvin, I found this quite interesting.  So much for the favorite fundamentalist/evangelical saying, "we only believe what the Bible says." More like the Bible as read through the lens of human reason. 

You can read the whole thing here.

There is no other word for this but idolatry.

Richard Gamble at the American Conservative writes a scathing review here (HT: imonk on Twitter).  I think he is spot on.

There was some discussion of this phenomenon in the comments on my previous blog post, "Authority in America."  This new Bible promotes the myth of America as a "Christian nation".  Here's a quote from Gamble's article summarizing this popular view:

The story … is straightforward and
reinforces the familiar Christian-America framework. This whole project
would collapse without that framework. America was founded on a
“Judeo-Christian ethic” drawn from the Bible. Until relatively
recently, principles taken from that ethic dominated America’s schools,
politics, and culture. Under assault by secularists who have obscured
the role of religion in American history and misappropriated the myth
of separation of church and state, the nation has declined morally. The
Bible must therefore be returned to its central place of authority in
American life in order to restore the nation’s moral fabric and reclaim
its special calling from God to defend freedom at home and abroad. The
phrase “one nation under God” best sums up what America once was and
what it will be again if enough concerned Christians rally to the call
for political action.

This is the story that I grew up with as an American evangelical, and which I didn't really question much until relatively recently when confronted with the facts about the matter.  The church I used to attend (before I became a Lutheran) very much held to the "Christian America" framework as summarized above.  American holidays were celebrated in church, where patriotic hymns would be sung and the choir would sing patriotic medleys applying 2 Chronicles 7:14 to America.  The Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S.A. would sometimes be recited during these times. I remember a few Thanksgiving Eve Communion services where the Founding Fathers were probably quoted more than Scripture. 

The story was that America was founded by Christians as a Christian
nation, and if only America would repent and return to that Christian golden age, everything would be wonderful.  Never mind that many of the Founding Fathers were Deists who rejected miracles, the deity of Christ and the authority of Scripture.  Never mind things like slavery, manifest destiny, and myriad other manifestations of the fact that America was hardly an example of moral purity before prayer and Bible reading were taken out of American public schools in the 1960's.  And never mind the fact that simply being a nation of relatively moral people does not equal being a Christian nation. 

The fact is, Americans tend to mix church and state in ways that people in other countries never dream of (and are often shocked by).  We have Americanism in church services, and a religious component to our patriotism. 

What would happen if America fell, like the Roman empire fell?  Many American Christians have no category for this whatsoever.  The only thing they can say is that with the end of America comes the end of the world.  Neither do they have any category for potential persecution or government hostility toward Christians.  That's for people in other countries, but not for Americans.  He'll Rapture us out of here before anything bad happens to us.  This is the attitude that is out there.

Would all these people who look at America as God's chosen nation still trust in God after such a scenario?  Or would they find that they had been engaging in idolatry – worshiping a god of their own imagination, of their own imaginary and idealized history?  I fear that the American Patriot's Bible can only fuel such idolatry. 

Read Richard Gamble's article here.

The Divine Service and the Mission of Christ’s Church

There are three fundamental questions in looking at the mission of Christ’s Church and the relationship to the Divine Service.  The first question is:  How is the liturgy understood theologically?  The second question:  Are we attentive to the religious culture of North America?  The third question:  What is the character of the community into which we seek to evangelize unbelievers?

In addressing the first question, the Augsburg Confession, Article VII provides our starting point:  “For it is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian Church that the Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine Word.”  Preaching and sacraments require form.  Freedom from rites and ceremonies instituted by men does not imply that the question of form is neutral.  Lutherans are concerned with the form of the liturgy from the perspective of the confession of the Means of Grace.  Lutherans see liturgy as God’s work, Gottesdienst, His divine service to us.  Thus Article XXIV of the Apology to the Augsburg Confession insists that the liturgy is the Lord’s public service to His people.  Essentially, liturgy is what the Lord does.  Luther captures this in his sermon on John 14:  “Thus the apostles and pastors are nothing but channels through which Christ leads and transmits His Gospel from the Father to us.  Therefore wherever you hear the Gospel properly taught or see a person baptized, wherever you see someone administer or receive the Sacrament, or wherever you witness someone absolving another, there you may say without hesitation:  ‘Today, I beheld God’s Word and work.  Yes, I saw and heard God Himself preaching and baptizing.’  To be sure, the tongue, the voice, the hands etc. are those of a human being; but the Word and the ministry are really those of the divine majesty Himself.  Hence it must be viewed and believed as though we were seeing Him administer Baptism or the Sacrament with His own hands.  Thus we do not separate, or differentiate between God and His Word or ministry, not do we seek God in another way or view Him in a different light” (Luther’s Works, vol. 24, p. 67).

If the liturgy is the Lord’s work, it cannot be made into an adiaphoron (indifferent things; those things not commanded by God nor forbidden by Him), for the pure preaching of the Gospel and the evangelical administration of the sacraments are required (see Article X of the Formula of Concord for further examination of a distinction between that which is commanded by God and those items which are neither commanded nor forbidden by the Word of God).  Our concern for the liturgy is not fueled by romanticism for the past but for the sake of the Gospel which is given by external means (extra nos), the Word rightly preached and the sacraments administered in accordance with our Lord’s mandate.

In response to the second question, we need to recognize that the religious culture of North America is Evangelicalism.  This culture has its roots first in Puritanism, which is basically Calvinistic, and secondarily in the great revival movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  Evangelicalism puts the emphasis on conversion as a personal decision and the church as a spiritual democracy.  Evangelicalism’s stress on the autonomy of the believer and the immediacy of spiritual experience apart from sacramental means has shaped a religious culture that accents an individualistic faith over churchly life and tends to characterize Baptism, Absolution, and the Lord’s Supper as peripheral to the Christian life.  This subjectivity, coupled with a suspicion of the intellect, has produced a religious culture that elevates heart over head, and emotion over intellect.  Wherever biblical authority is lost, Christ is displaced, and the Gospel is distorted, then our interests have displaced God’s, and we are doing His work in our own way.  The loss of the centrality of Christ in the life of today’s church in North America is becoming more and more common.  It is this loss that allows us to transform worship into entertainment, Gospel preaching into marketing, believing into technique, and living a sanctified life into feeling good about ourselves.  God does not exist to satisfy human ambitions, cravings, the appetite for consumption, or our own private spiritual interests.  We must continue to focus on Christ in our worship, rather than the satisfaction of our personal needs.  Our concern must be for God’s kingdom, not our own popularity or success.

Thirdly, what is the character of the community into which we are evangelizing unbelievers?  Our mission is to evangelize unbelievers into the Church, the body of Christ.  The Church lives in many cultures, but is at home in none, as our citizenship is in heaven.  In Revelation 7, John writes:  “After these things I looked and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, saying:  ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’”  This is the culture of God’s doing.

We may not drive a wedge between heaven and earth.  The Lord Jesus Christ “has ascended far above all heavens in order to fill all things,” say the apostle Paul.  Our Lord has crossed over from eternity into time in His incarnation.  He has given us the new birth from above, the rebirth of Holy Baptism by which we are made heirs of His heavenly kingdom.  Baptism gives us birth into a new culture, the culture of heaven.  We do not have to wait until we die to have a share in heaven.

The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is “heaven on earth.”  That is why we sing the Sanctus with “angels and archangels, and the whole company of heaven.”  That is why our liturgy is not and cannot be an echo of the pop culture with its sound bites and its exchange of edification for entertainment.  No, the liturgy is the repetition of the heavenly song.  Like Moses before the burning bush, we are on holy ground when we gather in the Lord’s name around font, pulpit, and altar.  These are holy places, for here God is distributing His gracious gifts to us.  Apart from these gifts, the Church has no mission.  Far from being detrimental to the Church’s mission, the liturgy is the source and goal of all missionary activity.

To God be the Glory.

In Christ,

Pastor Ray