Notice to Australian Lutherans (and others!)

VISIT OF PRESIDENT MATTHEW HARRISON
President Matthew Harrison of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) will be visiting Adelaide from 25th to 31st May, 2013. As part of this visit, President Harrison will be presenting a public lecture at Australian Lutheran College on Wednesday 29th May, 1-2PM on the topic of 'Sasse in today's context'.

The Lie

The lie is the death of man, his temporal and his eternal death. The lie kills nations. The most powerful nations of the world have been laid waste because of their lies, History knows of no  more unsettling sight than the judgement rendered upon the people of an advanced culture who have rejected the truth and are swallowed up in a sea of lies. Where this happens, as in the case of declining pagan antiquity, religion and law, poetry and philosophy, life in marriage and family, in the state and society - in short, one sphere of life after another falls sacrifice to the power and curse of the lie. Where man can no longer bear the truth, he cannot live without the lie. Where man denies that he and others are dying, the terrible dissolution [of his culture] is held up as a glorious ascent and decline is viewed as an advance the likes of which has never been experienced.
Union and Confession, 1933. 

HT Pr Matthew Harrison

The Renaissance and the Reformation

 

"the Renaissance...must be understood as the great secular countermovement against the attempt of the Middle Ages to build a Christian world. This attempt, like all similar ones in later times, ended not in the Christianization of the world but in the secularization of the Church. The world did not become Church; rather, the Church became world. The Reformation was in its deepest nature an attempt to save the Church from that destiny."

From Sin and Forgiveness in the Modern World: Reflections on the approaching the 450th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Christianity Today, 11, March 3, 1967, 5.

Reformation Day, 1917

I still remember that cloudy, misty Autumn morning in northern Germany. The Divine Service in the open air would be for many of those present their last celebration of holy communion. Straight after the celebration, we were plunged into one of the bloodiest battles of Flanders..Surely that Jubilee deserved something better. But with it there arose a new appreciation of the central article of faith of the Lutheran Reformation. It is as though the tremendous gravity of war, the encounter with death and the experience of God's judgment that it brought, were needed for modern man to grasp again the message of the Reformation: the justification of the ungodly by faith alone.

Note - Sasse is writing in 1942, reminiscing about Reformation Day, 1917, the 400th anniversary of the Reformation. There were three great battles in Flanders during WW1; Sasse is referring to what is known to English speakers as The Battle of Passchendaele, which concluded in early November, 1917 with half a million casualties on both sides. During this battle, Sasse, a sergeant in the German infantry, earned the Iron Cross (2nd Class), the second highest battle honour in Germany at the time.
Since soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) were heavily involved at Passchendaele, it is possible that Sasse saw action against his future countrymen.

From The Message of the Reformation in Changing Times, a talk given in Erlangen, Germany on 10th November, 1942.

The Lonely Way

As Luther once went the lonely way between Rome and Spiritualism, so the Lutheran Church today stands alone between the world powers of Roman Catholicism on the one hand and modern Protestantism on the other. Her doctrine which teaches that the Spirit is bound to the means of grace is as inconceivable to modern people in the twentieth century as it was to their predecessors in the sixteenth. But we are convinced that behind this doctrine stands one of the most profound truths which has ever been expressed in Christian theology.

From 'The Lutheran Doctrine of the Office of the Ministry' in The Lonely Way, volume 2 p138 (Concordia Publishing House, St Louis, 2002, trans. Matthew Harrison).

Note: A third volume in The Lonely Way series of essays is due from CPH soon.

Luther's Theology of the Cross 2: The Cross in the Ancient Church

The church had to traverse a long distance before it could fully clarify its understanding of the cross of Christ in Luther's theology of the cross. It has often been observed how small was the role played by the theology of the cross in the ancient church. It is true that the church in the first centuries along with the church throughout the ages has lived by Christ's death and has recognized this fact. The death of the Lord is a present reality every Lord's Day and at every celebration of the Lord's Supper (there has never been another Supper!). The Fathers hardly quoted any Old Testament passage as often as they did Isaiah 53. The sign of the cross was already an established Christian custom by the second century, and yet Christian art of the time represented our redemption by portraying types from the Old Testament rather than scenes of Christ's passion. Only by the fourth century does Christian sculpture begin reluctantly to depict the passion as one of the gospel stories. Even early theology is not able to say much about the death of Christ.

When, at a later date, the great question was asked: Why then did God become man? It is not directed to Christ's death but to the reason for his incarnation. In this way the cross is taught in connection with the incarnation and not yet as a doctrine on its own. The cross is also included in the mystery of the resurrection (what we call Good Friday and Easter were celebrated by the oldest church simultaneously in the festival of Pascha or Passover). But even so, the actual event of our salvation remained the incarnation, as Irenaeus said: "On account of His infinite love He became what we are in order that we might become what He is"

Thus for the ancient church, as for the Eastern church even today, the cross is hidden in the miracles of Christmas and Easter. The darkness of Good Friday vanishes in the splendour of these festivals in which the cross is outshone by the divine glory of Christ the Incarnate and the Risen Lord. Even long after the church had begun to represent Christ Crucified in its art, the glory outshone the cross. When, at the end of antiquity and in the early Middle Ages, the crucified Christ replaced Christ the Victor (Christos Pantocrator) in the triumphal arch of the church above the altar, he is still portrayed as kind and triumphant. The Christ represented in the ancient church and in the Romanesque churches of the Middle Ages does not suffer; he remains triumphant even on the cross, and the cross itself always appears as the sign of victory rather than of suffering and death: "In this sign you will conquer" or "The royal banners forward go; the cross shines forth in mystic glow." The  resurrection of our Lord, then, marked the beginning of our redemption and of our resurrection.

Why was this the case? How are we to explain the limitations of the theology of ancient Christianity? To be sure, we must not forget that the divine revelation in the Holy Scriptures is so rich that whole centuries are needed to clarify its contents. We cannot expect that the church of the first Ecumenical Councils would already have solved the questions of the medieval Western world. Their problems were determined by the horizon of their time and its thought. Thus, for example, it would have been in bad taste for a Greek to portray artistically the scene of crucifixion - after all, would you hang a picture of a criminal on the gallows in your dining room?

As for understanding the redemption, the Greek Fathers could not escape their idealistic conception of man. Even the great Athanasius never considered "by what measure one weighed a sin." They were all Pelagians; for them, as for Dostoevsky and the Russians, the sinner is at bottom a poor, sick person who needs to be healed by patient love and the heavenly medicine and not, as was the case for the Romans, a criminal and lawbreaker who needed correction and justification. How is it possible for a person to understand the cross if he does not know who and what sent Christ to the cross? How can he understand the cross if he does not know with Paul Gerhardt that "I caused Thy grief and sighing by evils multiplying as countless as the sands. I caused the woes unnumbered with which Thy soul is cumbered, Thy sorrows raised by wicked hands"! Lacking an understanding of the full dimensions of sin, the ancient church and the Eastern church never attained a theology of the cross.

Letters to Lutheran Pastors No. 18; October, 1951.

Luther's Theology of the Cross: 1, The Importance of the Cross

Luther’s Theology of the Cross

1. The importance of the cross
"Preach one thing: the wisdom of the cross!" That is Luther's answer to the vital question posed by the ministers of all ages: what shall I preach? The wisdom of the cross, the word of the cross, that great stumbling block to the world, is the proper content of Christian preaching, is the Gospel itself. So teaches Luther and the Lutheran church with him.

The Christian world regards the preaching of the cross as greatly one-sided. The cross is just part of the Christian message beside others. The second article of the Creed is not the whole creed, and even in the second article the cross takes its place among the other facts of salvation. Thus Luther is guilty of a narrowing of Christian truth when he limits real Christian preaching to the theology of the cross. Even some Lutherans say the same thing today!. After all, is there not also a theology of the incarnation and a theology of the resurrection? Ought we not supplement what is taught about God in the second article with what is taught in the third article of the Creed about the theology of the Holy Spirit and his activity in the church? Luther did indeed have much to say about these matters too - for example in his teaching on incarnation and on the sacraments. He also understood the article of creation as few theologians before him did. How then shall we answer the charge of the one-sidededness of Luther's theology of the cross, which is a criticism much heard? What do the critics mean by the alleged narrowing? Apparently it does not mean that the whole church year shrinks to Good Friday, but rather that one cannot understand Christmas, Easter, or Pentecost without Good Friday. Luther, like Irenaeus and Athanasius before him, was certainly one of the great theologians of the incarnation; yet he was so because he saw the cross behind the manger. While he understood the victory of Easter as well as any theologian of the Eastern Church, he understood it because he saw Easter as the victory of the Crucified One. The same can be said about his view of the Holy Spirit's activity.

According to Luther, then, all topics of theology are illuminated by the cross. Why? Because the deepest meaning of revelation lies hidden in the cross. For this reason Luther's theology of the cross wants to be more than one of many theological theories which have appeared in the course of church history. In contrast to that other theology prevailing in Christendom, which Luther calls the theology of glory, the theology of the cross claims to be the correct scriptural theology by which Christ's church stands or falls. The preaching of the cross alone, Luther contends, is the preaching of the Gospel.

What then is the theology of the cross?

(From Letters to Lutheran Pastors No. 18)