Why are We Lutherans?
“It so happens that the people who lived in the Age of the Reformation knew and understood certain truths which were later forgotten and had to be learned from them again. The loyalty of the Evangelical Lutheran Church is accounted for by these experiences. We are faithful to this church, not because it is the church of our Fathers, but because it is the church of the Gospel; not because it is the church of Luther, but because it is the church of Jesus Christ. If it became something else, if its teaching were something other than a correct exposition of the plain Word of God, it would no longer be our church.
“It is not the Lutheran liturgy that matters. The church can get along without it if it must. It is not the Symbolic Books that count. If it should ever be demonstrated that they contain essential errors, we would be the first ones to cast them into the fire, for our norma normans, the standard by which we judge doctrines, is the Bible alone. Nor is it the Evangelical Lutheran Church, as a separate church in Christendom, that matters. The moment it becomes anything else than the stand on which is put the lamp which alone is a light upon our path, it becomes a sect and must disappear. We would not be Lutherans if we did not believe this!”
From Here We Stand, Nature & Character of the Lutheran Faith (E.T. Theodore Tappert, rights assigned to Lutheran Publishing House, Adelaide, 1979)
Amen!
Powerful.
It took me 38 years (from confirmation) to finally appreciate this about the Lutheran confession.
Karen, the day we stop growing in our understanding of these blessed realities, is the day we die, and then we have the joy of the vision of God directly!
Blessings,
PTM
Sasse was evidently concerned that the Lutheran Church be a continuation of the apostolic church through apostolic doctrine expressed in apostolic liturgy. So he said: “Lutheran theology differs from Reformed theology in that it lays great emphasis on the fact that the evangelical church is none other than the medieval Catholic Church purged of certain heresies and abuses. The Lutheran theologian acknowledges that he belongs to the same visible church to which Thomas Aquinas and Bernard of Clairvaux, Augustine and Tertullian, Athanasius and Ireneaus once belonged. The orthodox evangelical church is the legitimate continuation of the medieval Catholic Church, not the church of the Council of Trent and the [First] Vatican Council which renounced evangelical truth when it rejected the Reformation. For the orthodox evangelical church is really identical with the orthodox Catholic Church of all times……………..It was no mere ecclesiastico-political diplomacy which dictated the emphatic assertion in the Augsburg Confession that the teachings of the Evangelicals were identical with those of the orthodox Catholic Church of all ages, and no more was it romanticism or false conservatism which made our church anxious to ……cling tenaciously to the old forms of worship.”
“Why are we Lutherans?” The Lutheran answer, of course, is: “Only by the grace of God!”