A Confession is Not A Confession that Is Not Confessed!
… In every church there can be and exists error, and even heretical opinions may occur. Every church is confronted with the problem how to deal in an evangelical way with such errors. What matters is, whether or not a church is prepared to maintain its doctrinal standard, whether it regards its confession as a real confession, and not only as a statute valid before men. I can assert a confession only if I believe it. …Training future pastors belongs to the highest ecclesiastical functions. The confessional obligation of the faculty of St. Louis is obviously different from that of Upsala where the chair of church history was occupied by a Methodist, to take only this example. Here lies for me the root of all differences between Missouri and the LWF churches. For you a confession is nothing, unless it is confessed…
Hermann Sasse, in a letter to Dr John W. Behnken, President of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, March 1, 1958.
Hermann Sasse was correct, and still is correct.
Claims by a church body of “we really confess” based upon “it’s in the Constitution” or “we say the Creed every Sunday when convenient”, with only contradictory evidence visible, such as their treating of the Bible as a “Did God really say” exercise in socio-political correctness and situational ethics, parsing the Augsburg Confession with a “that was then, this is now” paper cutter, and demonstrating a clearly different belief in its resolutions, programs, external relationships and practices, leave such a place no more Lutheran Christian than the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was a republic, was democractic and was German (given the puppet masters pulling the strings). There is no manner in which heterodoxies, pluralism, relativism and unionism (to name just a few) indicate adherance to any confession except that encouraged by an un-Godly puppet master pulling their strings?
Please forgive me for the run-on sentence, oh Editor (wait, that’s why there are Editors!).