A guest post by Rev. Dr. Holger Sonntag. Since Dr. Sonntag is from Germany and very familiar with the ecclesiastical situation, I asked if he would have any thoughts on the resignation of Dr. Margot Käßmann, who was the head of the EKiD and the bishop of the largest territorial Lutheran church in Germany recently. She is an advocate for homosexuality and, of course, the liberal theology of the state church in Germany. Here are Dr. Sonntag’s comments:

On February 24, 2010, Dr. Margot Käßmann, the chairperson of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany and the bishop of the largest Lutheran territorial church in Germany, resigned from all her offices. She had been a bishop for a bit more than ten years and at the helm of the ECG for about four months. Prior to becoming a bishop she had held a parish pastorate for only a few years; instead, she had spend much of her time holding various functions in the global ecumenical movement.

What caused her to resign? On February 20, at 11 p.m., the Saturday after Ash Wednesday, she had been caught running a red light while intoxicated. The police established her blood alcohol content as .154%. While her fellow council members assured her of their ongoing trust in her in a telephone conference on February 23, but left the final decision up to her, she resigned nonetheless on the following day. As she put it once, she wanted her “personal power to convince” to be “unhampered.” And this public moral failure was apparently seen by her as a major hindrance to such authenticity.

The reactions in Germany range from dismay (not so much about her drunk driving, but about her resignation) to respecting her integrity. Many saw her as a dynamic, honest leader who made the church credible again in the eyes of non-members. Others, however, saw her as a divisive figure who felt constrained to comment on any number of social and political issues, even without (or against) God’s clear Word, and who personalized her office as probably no one had done before in recent history.

What can be said about this major event? First of all, it was perhaps providential that she resigned from her offices on the day of St. Matthias, the man who was chosen to replace Judas. Important are these words in Acts 1: “For it is written in the Book of Psalms, May his camp become desolate, and let there be no one to dwell in it; and Let another take his office [episkopee, same word use for bishopric]. So one of the men [andres, males] who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us — one of these men must become with us a witness to his resurrection.” All apostles, thus, ought to be males; accordingly, all pastors ought to be males as well. This is what God’s Word here and elsewhere teaches. Therefore, even though Dr. Käßmann had occupied her episcopal office for over ten years and women’s ordination is seen by many in the Protestant church as normal, it bears repeating that she should not have held this office in the first place. What is more, not only did she hold this office illegitimately, she also, during her tenure as bishop, ensured that those objecting to women’s ordination would not be allowed to enter into the ministry in the first place. The fact that this totally unscriptural practice did not cause an outcry in Germany and around the world speaks volumes about the level of indifference and ignorance regarding the deformation of an institution of the Lord of the church.

Read more…

(HANNOVER) In a vote that has stunned both Lutherans and Protestants across Germany, the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKiD), published on Monday, September 28, 2009 its decision regarding one of the most critical documents to emerge from the Reformation. The Commission for Theology (Kammer für Theologie), the official theological advisory board of the EKD, voted to reject accepting the Augsburg Confession of 1530 as one of its fundamental documents.

The decision had been referred to the Commission by the Council of the EKD who, after several years of scholarly discussions on the question involving both Lutheran and Reformed theologians, had requested a final vote. The Commission considered three questions in making its decision which it presented in a document titled, “Should the Augsburg Confession become the primary confession of the Evangelical Church in Germany?” The Commission asked 1) “What purpose does the acceptance of handed down confessional texts have for the fundamentals and understanding of the individual evangelical churches in general?” 2) “What is the relationship of the fundamentals of the EKD, as a fellowship of individual evangelical churches, to the fundamentals of her member churches?” 3) “What would it mean to accept the text of the Augsburg Confession into the fundamentals of the EKD?”

Known simply as “Number 103,” in a series of EKD texts available on line http://www.ekd.de/download/ekd_texte_103.pdf, the concluding statement reads, “The Commission for Theology advises the Council of the EKD not to accept the Augsburg Confession as a primary confession in the EKD fundamentals.” The Commission is co-chaired by Michael Beintner (Münster) and Professor Dorothea Wendebourg. The vote was unanimous and agreed to by the EKD Council, which affirmed its readiness to continue strengthening the bonds of the EKD. Instead of accepting the Augsburg Confession, a document that both Lutherans and Protestants in Germany agree “has been the core confession of all of German Protestantism from 1530 to 1806″ (Prof. Dr. Wolf-Dieter Hauschild, Münster), the Council referred dissenters to its 2001 adoption of “Church Fellowship in Evangelical Understanding” (KneV). There it states that the EKD does not seek to form “a canonical church, like her member churches,” since the EKD already is [the] church in the fullest sense of the word. Perhaps mindful that KneV was German Protestantism’s response to the Vatican’s August 2000 document “Dominus Iesus,” which affirmed the primacy of the Roman Church over all other “ecclesial communities,” EKD President Hermann Barth stated, “Measures by which the EKD must first become the church are not necessary, since she is already it in the theological sense, since church fellowship is church.” The EKD reaffirmed it’s continuing commitment to the Leuenberger Konkordie.

In addition to serving on the Commission for Theology for the EKD, Professor Wendebourg also serves on the Theological Advisory Board (TAB) of the WordAlone Network (WAN), a group within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). In 2002, Wendebourg, coauthored a document for WAN in opposition to the Lutheran – Episcopal agreement “Called to Common Mission” entitled “Admonition for the Sake of the True Peace and Unity of the Church.” In it, Wendebourg and others call, among other things, for ordinations “of equal standing,” whereby episcopal and presbyteral ordinations are equally recognized. The “Admonition” cites the Augsburg Confession throughout.

Written by Pastor Kris Baudler
St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Bay Shore, NY
Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, Brentwood, NY