... an LCMS pastor is the religious leader coordinating and sending out emails for a local Christian Unity gathering. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
quinfirefrorefiddle will know why I snicker each time I see one.
The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod (aka LCMS or just "Missouri Synod") is much more conservative than the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Although they aren't the most conservative Lutheran church in America, they're the largest conservative Lutheran denomination. And they have an institutional phobia about doing anything with people who don't hold and proclaim the "pure Gospel" like they do. They couldn't possibly do anything that might imply that they endorse anything that isn't the ABSOLUTELY PURE LUTHERAN DOCTRINE (which they are the only arbiters of), and nobody can possibly be a true Lutheran without agreeing with them on every tiny point of doctrine (and some of them aren't too sure that people who disagree with them can even be called true Christians at all). Most lay people in their church aren't bad about it, but some of their pastors can and do lead witch-hunts to root out impure doctrine and improper ecumenism.* So when I see an LCMS pastor working on anything to do with Christian Unity, it's funny. And I wonder what his superiors and fellow pastors think of him ...
*You may recall that after 9/11, an LCMS district president (their equivalent of a bishop) participated in a huge ecumenical prayer service in New York City. (It might have been held at Yankee Stadium? It was a really big deal, anyway, lots of religious leaders from lots of denominations.) He had permission from the overall president of the LCMS to do it, but the ultra-conservative faction managed to get him brought up on charges anyway, hoping to use him to oust the president (who was, gasp, shock, horror, only a moderate conservative, not an ultra-conservative). The District President resigned, instead.
For those of you interested in the history of it, in the late 60s there was a sea-change in American mainstream Protestant theology (and the LCMS was, at that point, part of mainstream Protestantism as much as any Lutheran group can be). The historical-critical method that had been developing in large European theology departments at universities since the mid-1800s was finally reaching saturation in American seminaries, not just the academically-focused ones, but the ones turning out ordinary parish pastors. (Basically, this perspective on the Bible says that the Bible was not meant to be a history textbook or a science textbook or a religion textbook, so don't try and treat it as one. It's a book of stories, that went through many stages of oral telling, writing, editing, and translation, before arriving at the state we have it today. As Christians, we believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God, but that doesn't mean that human beings can't have messed it up in places or gotten the details wrong or just not cared about the kinds of details we think are important.) The more literal-minded folks were upset about it. The conservative faction was also leary about greater Lutheran unity: Lutheran groups in general spent the 20th century merging lots of small fragmentary denominations into a few large ones, and also building closer relationships with other Christians in general. In 1969, J.A.O. Preus II, a conservative from a very prominent Lutheran family, was elected President of the LCMS on a platform of not getting any closer to other church groups than they already were. The same convocation also ratified a pulpit fellowship agreement with the American Lutheran Church (ALC)--the very thing Preus had been elected to prevent! He needed something to give to his allies. So he went after the most liberal seminary the LCMS had at the time, Concordia St. Louis.
It was a witch hunt. There were anonymous accusations of professors teaching "impure doctrine," but no concrete statement of what the problematic doctrine actually was. There were accusations that a majority of professors at Concordia St. Louis were teaching it, but only one was named, and he got suspended without anyone ever actually saying what he was being suspended for. Finally, in 1973, the students and professors got fed up and demanded that the charges (and who was being accused) be made public. The seminary's board of directors refused, as did Preus and his people. So most of the students and professors walked out and created their own seminary, the Seminary in Exile, or Seminex. Cue an even larger witch hunt and a propaganda battle. I had to do a paper on it in seminary, on the ways the split was (and was not) reported in the LCMS magazine. Within a few years, Seminex was permanently separated from the LCMS (and had taken a decent number of congregations with it, forming the American Evangelical Lutheran Chuch, or AELC, not to be confused with an earlier and completely separate denomination called the American Evangelical Lutheran Church which was one of the Lutheran Church in America's predecessor bodies), and anyone not willing to toe the ultra-conservative party line had been either removed from any leadership position or hounded out of the LCMS altogether.
The new-born American Evangelical Lutheran Chuch didn't want to be a denomination on its own, so it approached the two largest Lutheran denominations at that time, the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America (we are not very creative about our names, you may have noticed) to see if they wanted to merge. They did in 1988, forming the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (see what I mean about the names?). Seminex disbanded, most of its faculty and students folding into the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Chicago, which was an LCA seminary before the formation of the ELCA. Meanwhile, the ultra-conservative faction that came to power has largely maintained a stranglehold on the denomination, mainly because they're quite willing to attack anyone who stands up to them and have the power to force people out. They have less power now than they used to, and I live in hope that things will change as the generation that came of age during the whole struggle (and were indoctrinated during it) die out.
I know all of this because I had to do a paper on how the main LCMS magazine covered the whole thing. And because one of my pastors growing up was a Seminex graduate. And because another prominent member of my home congregation had been a teacher at an LCMS teacher's college (Concordia Falls River, I think?) who was forced out during the witch hunts because he (a math teacher, not even in the science department) wouldn't swear to only teach and endorse a literal six-day creation of the universe as scientific fact. And because one of my classmates at seminary (now an ELCA pastor) had been an LCMS deaconness working in the New York district offices in 2011 and 2012, and her boss was the one who got canned for praying at an ecumenical prayer service. It's a crying shame and (I think) a great offense against the Body of Christ that the LCMS does what it does. But the ELCA has gotten some great people as both pastors and lay people out of the whole thing.
tl;dr: the LCMS has been kinda screwed up since the late 1960s.
quinfirefrorefiddle will know why I snicker each time I see one.The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod (aka LCMS or just "Missouri Synod") is much more conservative than the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Although they aren't the most conservative Lutheran church in America, they're the largest conservative Lutheran denomination. And they have an institutional phobia about doing anything with people who don't hold and proclaim the "pure Gospel" like they do. They couldn't possibly do anything that might imply that they endorse anything that isn't the ABSOLUTELY PURE LUTHERAN DOCTRINE (which they are the only arbiters of), and nobody can possibly be a true Lutheran without agreeing with them on every tiny point of doctrine (and some of them aren't too sure that people who disagree with them can even be called true Christians at all). Most lay people in their church aren't bad about it, but some of their pastors can and do lead witch-hunts to root out impure doctrine and improper ecumenism.* So when I see an LCMS pastor working on anything to do with Christian Unity, it's funny. And I wonder what his superiors and fellow pastors think of him ...
*You may recall that after 9/11, an LCMS district president (their equivalent of a bishop) participated in a huge ecumenical prayer service in New York City. (It might have been held at Yankee Stadium? It was a really big deal, anyway, lots of religious leaders from lots of denominations.) He had permission from the overall president of the LCMS to do it, but the ultra-conservative faction managed to get him brought up on charges anyway, hoping to use him to oust the president (who was, gasp, shock, horror, only a moderate conservative, not an ultra-conservative). The District President resigned, instead.
For those of you interested in the history of it, in the late 60s there was a sea-change in American mainstream Protestant theology (and the LCMS was, at that point, part of mainstream Protestantism as much as any Lutheran group can be). The historical-critical method that had been developing in large European theology departments at universities since the mid-1800s was finally reaching saturation in American seminaries, not just the academically-focused ones, but the ones turning out ordinary parish pastors. (Basically, this perspective on the Bible says that the Bible was not meant to be a history textbook or a science textbook or a religion textbook, so don't try and treat it as one. It's a book of stories, that went through many stages of oral telling, writing, editing, and translation, before arriving at the state we have it today. As Christians, we believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God, but that doesn't mean that human beings can't have messed it up in places or gotten the details wrong or just not cared about the kinds of details we think are important.) The more literal-minded folks were upset about it. The conservative faction was also leary about greater Lutheran unity: Lutheran groups in general spent the 20th century merging lots of small fragmentary denominations into a few large ones, and also building closer relationships with other Christians in general. In 1969, J.A.O. Preus II, a conservative from a very prominent Lutheran family, was elected President of the LCMS on a platform of not getting any closer to other church groups than they already were. The same convocation also ratified a pulpit fellowship agreement with the American Lutheran Church (ALC)--the very thing Preus had been elected to prevent! He needed something to give to his allies. So he went after the most liberal seminary the LCMS had at the time, Concordia St. Louis.
It was a witch hunt. There were anonymous accusations of professors teaching "impure doctrine," but no concrete statement of what the problematic doctrine actually was. There were accusations that a majority of professors at Concordia St. Louis were teaching it, but only one was named, and he got suspended without anyone ever actually saying what he was being suspended for. Finally, in 1973, the students and professors got fed up and demanded that the charges (and who was being accused) be made public. The seminary's board of directors refused, as did Preus and his people. So most of the students and professors walked out and created their own seminary, the Seminary in Exile, or Seminex. Cue an even larger witch hunt and a propaganda battle. I had to do a paper on it in seminary, on the ways the split was (and was not) reported in the LCMS magazine. Within a few years, Seminex was permanently separated from the LCMS (and had taken a decent number of congregations with it, forming the American Evangelical Lutheran Chuch, or AELC, not to be confused with an earlier and completely separate denomination called the American Evangelical Lutheran Church which was one of the Lutheran Church in America's predecessor bodies), and anyone not willing to toe the ultra-conservative party line had been either removed from any leadership position or hounded out of the LCMS altogether.
The new-born American Evangelical Lutheran Chuch didn't want to be a denomination on its own, so it approached the two largest Lutheran denominations at that time, the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America (we are not very creative about our names, you may have noticed) to see if they wanted to merge. They did in 1988, forming the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (see what I mean about the names?). Seminex disbanded, most of its faculty and students folding into the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Chicago, which was an LCA seminary before the formation of the ELCA. Meanwhile, the ultra-conservative faction that came to power has largely maintained a stranglehold on the denomination, mainly because they're quite willing to attack anyone who stands up to them and have the power to force people out. They have less power now than they used to, and I live in hope that things will change as the generation that came of age during the whole struggle (and were indoctrinated during it) die out.
I know all of this because I had to do a paper on how the main LCMS magazine covered the whole thing. And because one of my pastors growing up was a Seminex graduate. And because another prominent member of my home congregation had been a teacher at an LCMS teacher's college (Concordia Falls River, I think?) who was forced out during the witch hunts because he (a math teacher, not even in the science department) wouldn't swear to only teach and endorse a literal six-day creation of the universe as scientific fact. And because one of my classmates at seminary (now an ELCA pastor) had been an LCMS deaconness working in the New York district offices in 2011 and 2012, and her boss was the one who got canned for praying at an ecumenical prayer service. It's a crying shame and (I think) a great offense against the Body of Christ that the LCMS does what it does. But the ELCA has gotten some great people as both pastors and lay people out of the whole thing.
tl;dr: the LCMS has been kinda screwed up since the late 1960s.
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Date: 2014-09-24 09:45 pm (UTC)From:The LCMS has given the ELCA a lot of great pastors. Strange how most of them are women....
And as it happens, when I was working my way through seminary in the seminary library (not Chicago) part of my job was checking to see that the issues of periodicals we thought we had were the ones we actually had. And thus I found the LCMS newspaper copies from the 60's to 80's. Anybody who thinks that Lutherans are polite, mild-mannered people should see the name calling on the front page of that thing, wow.
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Date: 2014-09-25 06:02 am (UTC)From:Reading the main LCMS magazine for the year that Seminex split off was ... interesting. They're running articles on the fruits of the spirit (gentleness! community! peace and love!) while at the same time Preus was writing articles about how the historical critical method (and all other modern approaches to Biblical studies, basically) are WRONG using all kinds of straw-men arguments and an entertaining variety of logical fallacies, so OBVIOUSLY anyone who believes they have a shred of merit not only isn't Lutheran, but isn't Christian. And the next month there's a letter from the committee to reconcile the two sides (appointed by Preus himself), except it's not given an article like any other official committee report, it's buried in the middle of the letters, complaining that it was pretty hard to do any reconciling work when unnamed persons *cough*Preus*cough* would keep saying and writing such polarizing (and inaccurate!) things.
I got a kick out of the letters section, actually. You could tell the staff was chafing at the dictates of the Preus hardliners. They couldn't say anything officially, but in the letters they could publish things like people comparing Preus' stranglehold on LCMS doctrine to Pope Leo X's stranglehold on the Roman Catholic church. (For those of you who are not Lutherans, Leo X was the pope when Martin Luther kicked off the Protestant Reformation and started the Lutheran church. Lutherans have called Leo X many things throughout the centuries, starting with "Antichrist" and getting worse from there. To compare their own elected President to him, yowza.) It would have been really easy to just skip that one, and probably politically safer, too. But there it was. And there was another letter complaining about censorship in the LCMS publications--specifically in regards to a beloved and well-respected top LCMS person who got canned because he was too liberal. The LCMS magazine said he was just retiring and they wished him well. The secular paper gave all the gory details of how badly he'd been treated as they were forcing him out. The letter to the editor complained that he shouldn't have to read a secular newspaper to find out what was really going on in his own denomination.
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Date: 2014-09-25 03:11 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-09-25 06:06 am (UTC)From:(He did eventually get brought up on formal charges before the church consistory body of the LCMS for teaching wrong doctrines, the only one connected with the whole thing to be so tried. He was acquitted of all charges.)
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Date: 2014-09-25 07:49 pm (UTC)From:My husband is a member of a LCMS church (so am I, technically, at least I'm on their rolls, although I consider myself LDS), and that particular church actually doesn't seem particularly crazy and is in fact fairly ecumenical and seems to always be doing things in the community. And they had no problems with accepting my LDS baptism as long as it was in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (which it was), and the pastor was even okay with my having problems with part of the Apostle's Creed. (We're in California, so I'm sure that helps too -- although also see below.)
On the other hand, his parents are also LCMS (in the Midwest), and their church and pastor is... well... pretty much exactly as you've described. Even his parents, who are pretty darned conservative, were taken aback when their pastor decided to take the opportunity to use his Christmas sermon last year to thunder against premarital sex and abortion. Really?! (I was at the time recovering from a miscarriage which could well have turned out instead as an elective termination due to fetal incompatibility with life, and although I'm sure the pastor is a nice guy I don't think I'll ever forgive him for that sermon. Ahem. Didn't mean to dump my issues all over your DW?)
So I guess it takes all sorts? I wonder if the LCMS is just wildly different on the ground level where pastors have to actually interact with the lay people?
Before we got married my husband used to go to a Wisconsin Synod church, and those guys were insanely conservative. My husband is a little oblivious, and I don't think he noticed how insane they were until I up and declared (after they said that Mormons were following the devil or something similarly charming) I was never going back and if he ever wanted me to attend church with him again we'd have to find another one. (That was when we found the LCMS church, which we've been quite happy with.) This was in California, too!
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Date: 2014-09-26 12:48 am (UTC)From:Lutherans tend to be intensely congregational in this country. That is, the seat of authority is not in the church hierarchy, but in the people who form the community of faith who come together in worship on a local level. (The pope=antichrist trope from the original Reformation is kind of embedded in our ideas of what religious hierarchy means, and in this country got folded in with American individualism and self-reliance and the fact that lots of the Lutherans who came to this country did so because they didn't agree with their official state church in the Old Country.) The LCMS takes this a little farther than the ELCA does; for example, they don't use religious terms for their hierarchy--instead of bishops, they have "district presidents" who are basically bishops but you can't call them that. A Lutheran pastor's job is to preach the Word and administer the sacraments, and then the congregation does the practical stuff of Christian life. An LCMS pastor can get called on the carpet for stuff they do outside their own congregation in the larger community--particularly if they worship openly with people who don't hold to LCMS doctrine, and DEFINITELY if they offer communion to non-LCMS members* (which is probably why your pastor counts you as a "member")--and they can be called on the carpet if they openly preach and teach things the LCMS considers heresy. But congregational-internal stuff about who is a member and all that, is mostly between the pastor and the church council. Which is why Preus fought so hard to control the LCMS seminaries and colleges: if he couldn't directly go after parish pastors who were leading their flock in what he considered the wrong direction, he needed to make sure they were thoroughly indoctrinated in the "correct" way to preach and teach before they ever got out into the parish.
In my home town, there is only one Lutheran church. It is LCMS. So there were several ELCA Lutherans living there who used to belong there because they didn't want to drive to the next town over. The pastor thought it was fine. He moved to a different church and the congregation called a new pastor, who was much more conservative. He found out he had ELCA members and they hadn't been re-confirmed (because, of course, ELCA confirmations don't teach the right doctrine so lots of LCMS pastors think they aren't valid), and he hit the roof. He sent all of them letters they were no longer welcome because they weren't LCMS--no "well, we believe some things differently than you've been taught, so let's sit down and talk about it," no nothing, just "don't let the door hit you on the way out."
What shocks me is that your pastor accepted an LDS baptism as a baptism, which says to me he probably knows very little about the LDS. I don't know much formally; I've never studied it or talked with a Mormon church leader. (I did grow up in an area with a significant Mormon presence and I have a colleague who used to pastor a church near the Utah border, and thus dealt with lots of ecumenical issues all the time and talks about it sometimes.) I know just enough to know that while Mormons and Christians use a lot of the same terms and tell some of the same stories, we mean radically different things and interpret them in very different ways. There's a lot of variation in what Christians believe, but Mormons are a significant step beyond that. It's not that Mormonism is bad or wrong, just different. And baptism is one of those things were the form is the same (same words, same water) but the meaning behind it is different enough that it's not really the same thing.
The analogy I would use is from baking. Say you have a recipe that calls for a teaspoon of baking soda. You can't substitute baking powder. Yes, they're both white powders that have an effect on dough, and they both have the word "baking" in their name. But they are NOT the same thing. It's not that one is bad and one is good. They're different, and if you try and treat them the same you're going to have problems. I know just enough about LDS understanding and practice of baptism to know that much, but not enough that I would feel comfortable explaining exactly what the differences are--I wouldn't want to get it wrong by mistake. But if I had a parishioner in your situation, I would darn well learn. So if I were your pastor, I would have handled it differently.
As for the Apostle's Creed, Nadia Bolz-Weber, a prominent Lutheran pastor and author, points out that a lot of good and faithful Christians have bits of the Apostle's Creed that they have problems with. That's why we say it together as a community of faith--each helping each other through places where we stumble. And, after all, there are plenty of Christians who don't use the Creed because it isn't in the Bible. We use it because it's been used as a basic faith statement since the third century of the Christian era, and so why reinvent the wheel? (Many of the churches that object to the Apostle's Creed because it isn't in the Bible have written their own statements of faith on a congregation-by-congregation basis. Usually, they're either very similar to the Apostle's Creed, so generic as to be virtually meaningless, or narrowly focused on whichever one part of the Christian faith they find most compelling. Lutherans look at this and shake our heads, because we think they threw the baby out with the bathwater, and pat ourselves on the back for being truer to the Christian heritage.)
tl;dr, I would disagree with your pastor's choices re: your baptism, but agree with him re: the Apostle's Creed.
*If I am in an LCMS congregation during worship for some reason, I am not allowed to take Communion because they don't think the ELCA understanding of Communion is close enough to Luther's teachings (despite the fact that our teachings on Communion come directly out of Luther's writings, same as theirs do, it's just a different interpretation). Since the LCMS doesn't allow women pastors, LCMS women who feel called by God to become pastors usually join the ELCA and become pastors in our denomination. A classmate of mine, former LCMS, still went back to her home congregation (where she had been baptized and confirmed and served for years as a teacher and in many other capacities, where her children had been born and baptized, etc.) for Christmas and Easter. She had many family and friends who still went there. But after she started going to an ELCA church and pursuing ordination through us, and before she had even formally left the LCMS (she was still on their roster as a deaconess), the pastor came to her and told her that neither she nor her husband nor her children would be allowed to take communion at that church ever again. And it wasn't enough to tell her that in private--whenever they came, a member of the church council would sit by them to block them in so they couldn't get up to go to communion. But there are also LCMS pastors (like your own seem to be) who function on a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" basis.
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Date: 2014-09-27 11:27 am (UTC)From:That being said... thinking about it more, I'm not sure. I mean, I know that Lutheran theology allows for lay baptism, and it seems to me that in that case you could hardly figure out if the baptizer held the correct theological principles. And then there's infant baptism, where the infant certainly doesn't. (My view here is no doubt colored by the LDS view on infant baptism ranging from silly at best to "abomination" at worst, and I know the parents/sponsors standing in for the kid is one of the principles Luther mentioned, but...) And I imagine that in all sects that baptize there are people who do misunderstand things who are baptized anyway... So it seems to me that there *is* something about the water and the word (and God working through it) that transcends human misunderstanding if real intent to turn towards God is there.
I must confess i don't really understand baptism anyway. Mostly I've talked about it with lay people, but... in the Lutheran view we are saved by grace alone, and we don' need to *do* anything to be saved, right? Except we do have to be baptized! of course that was a commandment, and not necessarily a *requirement*... except that it gets treated as one (even by Luther, I think).
The LDS view of baptism, I think, is not so different in many ways, in that we acknowledge that it is a commandment and a requirement, and that it has to do with Christ's death and life and the forgiveness of sins. There is a lot of other baggage, like making a sacred covenant with God and the priesthood and so on, but I consider that shouldn't be a factor. (We do consider it necessary for salvation.) We do subscribe to a variant of the Pelagian heresy in that we don't believe in original sin, which I could imagine making a big difference to an orthodox pastor. (I was surprised to find as an adult how many LDS doctrines can be succintly described by early-church heresies :) ) In practice, of course, it comes out to be much the same as believing in it would be, as we do acknowledge that everyone *does* sin (except small children) and needs Christ's atonement.
On the... fourth... hand, Wikipedia tells me that Lutherans don't recognize LDS baptism because our view of the Trinity doesn't mesh, which actually makes a lot more sense (if what I mean by the Father isn't what you mean, then maybe the words don't mean what they migh otherwise mean?) except that I know a BUNCH of lay people whose conception of the Trinity follows pretty closely the Mormon definition rather than the orthodox Christian definition, and presumably their baptisms are valid!
tl; dr: I think my pastor had a point, although I can understand it's a knotty theological issue :) In any case... this church does seem pretty darn welcoming. My husband's parents' church I don't take communion in, because I am pretty sure he would not be so welcoming of my heretical self :)
Re: creeds: going along with what you said, one of the things I think is hilarious about Mormonism is that we think creeds are abominations, and then... we... made up our own. Only we call them "Articles" instead of "Creeds," so that's all right ;) (To be less facetious, I think the underlying reason if you asked an LDS theologian would have to do with the schisms when they were made, and ours are different in the sense that they don't have that historical baggage along with them. We have schisms, but for other reasons :) )
I should also note here that I consider myself LDS mostly as a point of practice (I am much more active in the LDS church than in the Lutheran one). As a point of belief I consider myself agnostic, but my beliefs such as they are probably align rather more strongly with Lutheran theology than with LDS theology (with some exceptions where my thinking is obviously slanted by LDS views, as above). So, you know, you've probably figured this out, but I'm probably not going to be offended by anything you say as long as it's done respectfully :)
Yeah, he only attended the Wisconsin Synod church for a little while, maybe a year or two? and he would just attend services (not Sunday school or anything) so it wasn't like he was talking to people :) Once I started going with him we started talking to people and attending Sunday School, and that was when the crazy came out, at least for me.
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Date: 2014-09-27 03:17 pm (UTC)From:On the... fourth... hand, Wikipedia tells me that Lutherans don't recognize LDS baptism because our view of the Trinity doesn't mesh, which actually makes a lot more sense (if what I mean by the Father isn't what you mean, then maybe the words don't mean what they migh otherwise mean?) except that I know a BUNCH of lay people whose conception of the Trinity follows pretty closely the Mormon definition rather than the orthodox Christian definition, and presumably their baptisms are valid!
Yes, I'm pretty sure that's the specific point of doctrine. Christians over the past century have done a piss-poor job of teaching our people about what it is we actually believe. Barna Group has done surveys where they call ordinary Christians up and ask them what they believe, and it's pitiful. Most "Christians," it turns out (even those who go to church), have very little clue what "Christians" actually believe--not the social issues, but the theology part, who God is and what God does. And that's our fault. (Which is why, every year in Confirmation, I teach about the Trinity and what it means.) But there's a difference between being ignorant and not really understanding it all that well and trying to figure out something that makes sense (the average Christian in the pew) and believing and teaching a fully-thought-out view that is very different (LDS). The one offers a lot more ... space for God, let's say.
And anyway, nobody understands the Trinity, not really. (And if they say they do, they're probably either lying or believe some heresy or another.) It's called a mystery for a reason. St. Augustine, one of the greatest Christian theologians who ever lived (whose ideas are still heavily embedded in most Christian theology), couldn't understand the Trinity. He spent a long time trying to figure it out and failing. Finally, God gave him a vision/dream: he was walking along an ocean beach and saw a boy digging a hole in the sand. The deeper he tried to dig, the more the sides collapsed because sand, and so he never got anywhere. Augustine told the child, you can't dig a deep hole in sand, it just doesn't work. The child told Augustine he had a better chance of doing it than Augustine did of understanding the Trinity. Augustine woke up, took it as a sign from God, and turned his attention to other things. Really, I think, could you expect a mortal human to truly understand the nature of a being so much greater than us as God is? If the human imagination was really able to comprehend God ... it would be a pretty clear sign to me that we had made him/her/it up, or that what we understood wasn't really God. Do you see what I'm saying?
Baptism: we do it because Jesus said to! The Bible makes it quite clear that if you believe and are baptized, you will be saved. Many Christians take it to mean that if you're not baptized, you won't be saved, thus everyone needs to be baptized to avoid going to hell. (Which I think is a pretty weird view of both God and Hell, actually, but that's another issue. Also, it tends to make baptism into nothing more than hell fire insurance.) But the thing is, nowhere in the Bible does it say that God can't save people who aren't baptized. In fact, in some places Jesus tells people that they are saved with no baptism anywhere to be found. He never baptized anybody himself, and he told a lot of people their sins were forgiven. So, good and helpful but not an absolute requirement.
And, oh, the Law! Yes. Lutherans have been debating about the uses of the Law and what it means since there have been Lutherans, and it's a lot more complicated than the summary taught in Confirmation class. You've got the first use of the Law, which is to regulate sinful people: you HAVE to behave thusly. You can't just go out and kill people, or lie about them, or steal, etc., etc. (And remember that to Lutherans we are all sinners and saints at the same time.) The first use of the law is to restrain evil. The second use of the law is to show people that they are sinners in need of God's grace and mercy. I mean, everybody breaks God's Law sometimes, no matter how good or pious they seem. Let's start with the first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me. How often do humans fear, love, and trust something more than they trust God? ALL THE TIME. Money, power, politics, sports ... there are so many things that we love and trust more than God. It just goes on from there. The more you know of the Law, and the more honest you are about your own flaws and failings, the more you'll know you need God. But you know what? God loves us, forgives us, and saves us from our sins! Yay! The first two uses of the law then no longer become necessary! (Although, realistically, we are saved, but we will remain sinners until the Resurrection, so, I wouldn't get too comfortable there.) Then you have the third use of the law, which is to provide a guide for those who are saved.
The third use of the law is like this. My middle brother is four years younger than I am; he was in high school when I was in college. I got a call from him one evening in my dorm. He was going to take a girl to a formal dance, and he was so excited--she was the prettiest, smartest girl in school with the most wonderful sense of humor. (Ah, young love.) But he had no idea what to do, and he wanted to do it right because he wanted this evening to be as awesome as he thought his new girlfriend was. So I told him: you need to rent a tux. And find out what color her dress is (ask her best friend, or maybe her mom if you're over at her house) and get a corsage for her. Find a nice restaurant you both like and make reservations. Etc., etc. And he was excited about all of it--he had fun going with his buds to the tux shop, and making a game out of figuring out her dress color to get the flowers while convincing her he was clueless, etc., etc. Think about how different that would have been if his attitude had been "Tuxes are expensive and those shoes pinch my feet. Why do I have to pay for flowers, too, they'll only wilt." etc., etc. The "why do I have to, yargh, this is so hard" is the first use of the law. The "Oh, awesome, I get to!" is the third use of the law. You see the difference?
I was surprised to find as an adult how many LDS doctrines can be succintly described by early-church heresies :)
Heh. Yes. You noticed! The thing is, all these heresies have old complicated Greek names, but most of them are not limited to Greece of 2k years ago. Christians regularly reinvent them. Because many of them are either simpler or more palatable to us. (I'm a good person not a sinner, so there can't be any original sin, right?) (Of course, would your spouse/parents/children/boss/neighbors agree that you're not a sinner? Maaaaaybe not.)
Small children: you know, lots of people have trouble believing in original sin because of babies and small children, who they believe don't sin. But you know what, I've spent time babysitting toddlers. And trouble begins as soon as they're mobile enough and have enough control over their bodies to interact once you put them down next to each other. How many times have I seen a baby/toddler reach out and purposefully hit the baby/toddler next to them, or steal a toy from them .... It's not a conscious thing; they don't understand good and evil, and their ability to do evil is limited just as their ability to do anything is limited. But as soon as they are capable of it, they start doing it, and have to be trained not to hurt their peers. So I have no trouble believing in the sinful nature of humanity.
Re: creeds: going along with what you said, one of the things I think is hilarious about Mormonism is that we think creeds are abominations, and then... we... made up our own. Only we call them "Articles" instead of "Creeds," so that's all right ;)
I know, right? :P
Wisconsin Synod: I'm sure there are some lovely people there. But there is also craziness. Back away slowly, slowly ...
ELCA has a lot broader grouping of people than any other Lutheran church body. We have everything from ultra-liberal to moderate conservative in our hierarchy, and on a local level we have some very conservative people. Which means that things like "how open is the communion table" can vary dramatically, because (within loose guidelines) we pretty much leave it up to the congregations and pastors. My training about Communion was basically "here's the theological stuff about what communion is, and here's a range of practical policies about it, what do you think?" On the first day of Worship class, the professor said he wasn't going to tell us THE RIGHT WAY to do it, he was going to teach us how to think theologically about what we do, so that we can adapt to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in the parish. For example, there was a lot of time spent on the symbolism of various actions, because people actually get more from what you do than what you say. So what are you teaching them by your actions if you, for example, break the bread as you say the words of institution (i.e. break it as you talk about Christ breaking it) vs. afterwards?
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Date: 2014-09-26 02:43 am (UTC)From:As a lapsed Catholic, I found a woman minister, a woman assisting and girl acolytes a welcoming site at the first service I attended with him.
Needless to say, it's an ELCA congregation.
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Date: 2014-09-26 06:37 am (UTC)From:As Lutheran groups came to this country, they started out worshiping in their native language (a German or Scandinavian language). Gradually they began worshiping in English and mixing more with the larger American community. They added American hymns and adapted their old ones. Sometimes they translated the words and left everything else the same. Sometimes they altered the rhythm or melody to better fit in with 19th Century American music norms. (An example of this in ELCA hymnals, both the green LBW and the new cranberry/red ELW have two versions of "A Mighty Fortress," one with the old German melody and one with the Americanized version that most ELCA congregations use. Having them side-by-side really points out how different they are.) Sometimes they took the translated words and set them to American hymn melodies.
The LCMS (virtually all ethnic Germans) added fewer American hymns and were a lot less likely to Americanize the musical elements of the hymns. And, yeah, in the late seventies they participated in the creation of the Lutheran Book of Worship, the "green book" which replaced the old red Service Book and Hymnal that the ALC and LCA had been using since the 1950s and whatever the LCMS had at the time. Now, this was the late 70s--the LCMS was still firmly under Preus' thumb and working merrily to root out dangerous liberals and moderates, and steadily pulling further and further away from other denominations every year, pulling out of agreements, not participating in ecumenical events they had before, etc., etc. The ELCA hadn't formed yet, but the AELC had approached both the LCA and ALC about merging together (out of which process the ELCA would emerge a decade later).
Whoever thought that working together with the LCMS--which has always been less willing to connect on matters of worship than any other area--to do a joint hymnal was a good idea must have been on something. By all accounts, the LCMS contributors held everything hostage. No LCMS congregation would buy it unless they got their way on several key issues. So the whole thing came out heavily weighted to LCMS worship and music and less to ALC and LCA styles. And then, once things had been largely locked down and it was too late for major changes, they announced that the LCMS was in the process of producing its own hymnal, so of course no LCMS congregations were going to buy it anyway, they'd wait a year or two for their own version. So the ALC and LCA were stuck with this new hymnal that didn't please anybody. The traditionalists grumped that it was different, which you'd have anyway. But there were people who didn't like the idea of the then-theoretical merger to form the ELCA and pointed to the problems of the hymnal as Proof that closer cooperation Was Not Good. Or who fought the hymnal tooth and nail but what they were really fighting was the idea of the merger. In some places, it got ugly. There are actually a fair number of congregations in Pennsylvania that flat-out refused to switch over, and kept using the old red SBH long after it was out of print. Some of them eventually broke down and got the LBW as their hymnals wore out; some got other hymnals; some held out until the new hymnal, Evangelical Lutheran Worship came out, and switched to that because it was even more different from the SBH than the LBW had been but it was still acceptable in ways the LBW WOULD NEVER BE. And there are a few that are still using the SBH.
The LBW caused such a fight that they really dragged their heels on coming out with a new hymnal to replace it because they didn't want to have a fight. The ELCA published or endorsed some "supplemental" hymnals to fill the gap. The SBH came out in 1958 and the LBW came out in 1978--a twenty year gap, pretty standard. (Obviously you don't want to replace hymnals too often, but you can't go too long, either, because then you're not keeping up with developments in hymns and worship styles.) The ELW came out in 2006, almost thirty years after the LBW.