Lutheranism

Speaking of being accountable to no one, First Things comes to mind.

It used to be the journal of record among orthodox Christian believers Protestant and Roman Catholic, alike. Founded out of the Sturm and Drang between Richard John Neuhaus and his former publisher which left Neuhaus put out on the sidewalk, down below the Rockford Center's editorial office in Manhattan. While the Rockford Center continued the publication Neuhaus had edited, replacing Neuhaus with Joe (Harold O. J.) Brown—who did a serviceable job, Neuhaus didn't miss a beat and started First Things.

At the time, Neuhaus's ministerial credentials were lodged with the mainline Lutheran Church of America (now the ELCA). Later, he converted to Rome. Despite my disappointment, Neuhaus's explanatory statement resonated with me and I've often thought of it since as I watched my own longtime denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America. On the general assembly and presbytery level, too often it appeared that institutional advancement and the protection of its denominational trademark trumped its Biblical calling as the pillar and foundation of God's truth.

Neuhaus wrote...

It's impossible to reconcile the Zwingli-bashing of former Baptists within the Covenant Renewal Worship, Federal Vision party with the actual words of Zwingli at the Marburg Colloquy and here in Zwingli's Short Exposition of the Christian Faith (1531). Zwingli is no "mere memorialist." Read his doctrine below. Then read his actual liturgy for the Eucharist, asking yourself if anyone in the Covenant Renewal Worship, Federal Vision group would object to this liturgy if they had no idea where it came from?

Two things they may object to (even not knowing they were hearing Zwingli's liturgy) are things where Zwingli is right: namely, Zwingli's repudiation of special attire for the celebrant and the faithfulness of Zwingli's warnings of danger to participants who don't eat and drink by faith.

The liturgy is at the end of the Short Exposition, beginning with the words, "Here follows substantially the order of service we use at Zurich, Berne, Basel, and the other cities of the Christian alliance." It's also instructive to read the text from Augustine near the end of the Short Exposition which Zwingli cites as an explication of in his position. Scroll to the end for Zwingli's liturgy and his defense from Augustine.

A Short and Clear Exposition of the Christian Faith

by Ulrich Zwingli

Chapter IV: The Presence of Christ's Body in the Supper

To eat the body of Christ sacramentally, if we wish to speak accurately, is to eat the body of Christ in heart and spirit with the accompaniment of the sacrament.

I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one would say you were baptized in my name. Now I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any other.

For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not in cleverness of speech, so that the cross of Christ would not be made void. For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  - 1Corinthians 1:14-18

Luther didn't bother writing a systematic theology because his dear friend Melanchthon had. Luther held Melanchthon's volume of systematics titled Loci Communes (Commonplaces in Theology) in such high esteem that he declared them worthy of inclusion in the canon: "Invictus libellus non solum immortalitate, sed quoque canone ecclesiastico dignus."

Considering the current fascination with all things sacramental among the Federal Vision crowd and Covenant Seminary alumni... 

Paragraph One, "The Future-End of Protestantism":

Protestants often act as if the Reformation were the end of history, the moment when the Church reached its final condition. For these sorts of Protestants, the future of Protestantism can only be more of the same. This cannot be. God is the living Creator, still at work in his world, and that means that the Protestantism of the future will be something new, and, given the pattern of God's creativity, something better.

Keeping in mind what I pointed out in an earlier piece, that Dr. Leithart originally titled this project "The End of Protestantism," it's clear Dr. Leithart has his work cut out for him in proposing Protestantism's "end" as a positive move. Paragraph one sets up Leithart's metanarrative. He prods readers to stop "acting" foolishly. We are to put aside our sectarian tribalism and hop on board his Train called Hopeful headed into a "better" future because an always-better future is "God's pattern of creativity."

In his second paragraph, Leithart moves on to build a sort of Biblical foundation for his metanarrative:

Paragraph Two, "The Future-End of Protestantism":

In the beginning, God created the world in six days, and each day improved on the previous one. He spoke light, separated light and darkness, and said it was good. Come the next day, and first-day good was not good enough, so he separated the waters below from the waters above and inserted a firmament between. After he tore the waters and called earth to fruitfulness, he said that was good too. Another evening and morning, and again good was not good enough, so he spent the fourth day hanging lights in the firmament, the fifth calling swarming things to swarm in the sea and birds to hover on the face of the sky, the sixth filling the earth with animals and creating man male and female in his image. Each day was good, but each was followed by darkness and dawn that made good better. When he finished, Yahweh God pronounced it very good and rested in what he had made.

Nice, that turn of phrase "tore the waters." Leithart enters the days of creation and the state of perfection to show God violent in his intense commitment to improvement: God tears things. Certainly, then, we may expect He'll tear things after the Fall, also. It's just His way: He tears things to improve things...

Paragraph One; "The Future-End of Protestantism":

Protestants often act as if the Reformation were the end of history, the moment when the Church reached its final condition. For these sorts of Protestants, the future of Protestantism can only be more of the same. This cannot be. God is the living Creator, still at work in his world, and that means that the Protestantism of the future will be something new, and, given the pattern of God's creativity, something better.

Although this is the third installment of our examination of Dr. Peter Leithart's call for the end of Protestantism and we've discussed his first paragraph before, there's more to say. Look at the third, fourth, and fifth words of his piece. Dr. Leithart pitches his narrative of change to those Protestants who only "act as if" the "future of Protestantism will be more of the same." He doesn't address their thoughts or convictions.

This wording could be a function of Dr. Leithart's graciousness. He's merely acknowledging that a proposition which ought to be rejected out of hand by any thoughtful man might still be able to worm its way into that man's habits until he acts as if the proposition were true. Yet I'm guessing something deeper is at work.

Postmodernism is committed to guarding the chasm it has constructed between beliefs and actions, convictions and practices. A close reading of Dr. Leithart indicates that he's less interested in changing Protestants' thoughts and doctrine than their actions and liturgies. Thus Leithart's gentle prodding of simple creatures of habit right at the beginning of his piece. To nominal Protestants caught up in acting as if the Reformation matters as much today as it did five centuries ago, Dr. Leithart issues his invitation...

Presbyterian Church in America teaching elders, Peter Leithart, Jeff Meyers, Rich Bledsoe and Trinity House friends are pushing peace with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Till now, the main thrust of their work has been displacing Reformed soteriology and sacramentology through (oatmeal stout) Federal Vision Lutheranism, but now they have turned to larger things. And central to these larger things is their work seeking to displace historic Reformed principles of worship with Anglican, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic liturgism.

In a short piece that ran as the lead article in the latest issue of Lutheran-convert-to-Roman-Catholicism Richard John Neuhaus's First Things (August/September 2014), Leithart attempts to shame fellow Protestant and Reformed pastors. Note his holy vehemence:

The modern age has seen more than its share of horrors, but none so stupefying as the spectacle of Christ re-crucified in our (Protestant/Roman Catholic) divisions. The only horror that might rival it is our complacency before this cross.

If Dr. Leithart is right that our love for Biblically Reformed doctrine, sacramentology, and worship is perpetuating the worst horror of the modern age; if he's speaking truth when he claims that Reformed pastors committed to the Westminster Standards are "recrucifying" Jesus Christ; there's nothing...

(NOTE: This is the fifth post in a series on Reformed worship. Here are the first first, second, third, fourth, and sixth.)

In the previous post, we saw that formalism in worship is very efficient in leading us and our congregants to play nice with Rome. We may do our best to remain vigilant in our soteriology, rallying round the cry “Faith alone!” even as we repudiate historic Reformed principles and orders of worship. We may continue to desire Presbyterian polity and a Reformed view of the real spiritual presence of our Lord in the elements even as we embrace the method and mechanisms of Anglicans' Book of Common Prayer.

Because of the poverty of worship in prior Evangelical Presbyterian or Baptist churches, many among us feel they must spurn the commitment of our Reformed fathers to Biblical simplicity. But let us know precisely what we are undoing before our deformission of Reformed worship reaches twenty years of age.

Today, we have a choice between the simplicity of reformed worship, regulated by God’s Word, or the ceremony and sarcedotalism inherent in the formulaic worship of the Book of Common Prayer and Covenant Renewal.

So you want to go back to the formulaic liturgy? This begs the question—Why? Can we be self-critical concerning our motivations?

Our motives are the same as the children of Israel. When we are faced with the job of entering the Promised Land and we hear their giants are giant, we have a choice: depend on God, or go back to Egypt. We can have a liturgy that is dependent on the work of the Holy Spirit or we can have control of our worship. This choice seems ridiculous to those who eschew what some might term extemporaneous preaching and worship, choosing instead to depend upon manuscripts they read and prayers they recite. But Reformed worship is not extemporaneous in the normal sense of "unprepared." Reformed pastors who look at the sheep of their flock and preach to them and lead them in prayer have never held the absence of preparation as a principle of Reformed worship...

(NOTE: This is the third post in a series on Reformed worship. Here are the first, second, fourth, fifth, and sixth.)

We have shown how Calvin and his fellow Geneva reformers were willing to live without weekly celebration of the Lord's Supper, yet there was not one service ever held in Geneva and her surrounding parishes that failed to place the reading and preaching of God's Word front and center. So why the growing shift to an emphasis of the sacraments in worship, over and against preaching?

There are many contributing factors, but one is in reaction to the American church of the twentieth century. In many corners, the church started taking on the naturalistic and materialistic culture around it, broadly accepting the mistaken theology that the Lord’s Supper is merely a memorial ordinance—a good way for us to rehearse in our minds what Jesus did for us long ago. Thus, as we started to rediscover the spirituality of the sacraments, we again recognized that Jesus Christ is really and spiritually present in the sacraments and, in them, He gives us Himself for our spiritual food. This is good, but in this...

(NOTE: This is the first post in a series on Reformed worship. Here are the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth.)

Calvin and the Genevan reformers worked to reform every aspect of Rome's doctrine and practice, and this was especially true of worship.

Leaving behind the priorities of the New Testament church, the worship of medieval Rome was deformed beyond recognition. Whereas the Jerusalem church's first devotion had been the teaching of the Apostles,1 Rome displaced preaching with the idolatry of the Mass. Read Calvin on many passages of Scripture and his opposition to Rome’s sacramentalism is front and center. Here is an excerpt from a sermon on Galatians 2:14-16:

But the good works which they (Rome) set afore us are, that we must go devoutly to Mass ...and do this and that. So then, all these hypocrites which will needs become righteous by their own works, have nothing but gewgaws [trinkets, showy trifles] and dotages: and yet for all that, they think themselves so holy and perfect, that nothing is amiss in them. They think that God ought to content himself with the great number of murlimews and countenances which they make. But that is not the coin wherewith he must be paid, for his law is spiritual. He looketh not upon the outward gesture, nor upon the things that carry a fair gloss before men, insomuch that if men set their minds too much upon his own Ceremonies, he rejecteth it utterly: And that is a thing well worthy the marking. For men seek still some startinghole, that they might not yield themselves to the obeying of God: and they bear themselves in hand, that when they have once dispatched their fond devotions, then they are well discharged and all the rest of their sins must be forgotten, because they ransom them by that means.

His text is the Holy Spirit's declaration that man is “not justified by the works of the law" and this is the occasion for Calvin to condemn “hypocrites" for their habit of “set(ting) their minds too much upon (God's) own ceremonies." Yes, Calvin recognizes the Lord's Supper is a ceremony commanded by our Lord that gives grace to those who discern the Lord's Body rightly, yet he warns those "setting their minds too much upon" it that God does not accept their ceremony, but "rejecteth it utterly." Heart religion is dependent upon the grace of the Holy Spirit and Calvin points out how men turn from it to ceremonies, thinking their ceremonies are God's Own currency. Didn't He Himself institute them?

In the time of Christ, the church's priests and Bible scholars made a show of obeying God by circumcising foreskins, yet they disdained the work that is dependent...