Church vs. State

When a state court can decide that the church has to tolerate heresy in its midst, then the teaching office of the church is destroyed, and it ceases to be church.

Lambeth 1958, Letters to Lutheran Pastors No. 48
Translated by Holger Sonntag and published here with his kind permission.

Note: At this point in the Letter, Sasse has been discussing the famous 'Gorham Case' of 1850, where a civil court, the Privy Council, ruled against a bishop seeking to uphold baptismal regeneration as the doctrine of the Chruch of England. One hundred and fifty years after the Gorham case, and fifty years after Sasse wrote the Letter, Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical leaders signed the 'Manhattan Declaration' on November 20, 2009, affirming their intention to resist, through civil disobedience if necessary, any state encroachment on the right of the church to define doctrine in regard to the sanctity of life, the dignity of marriage between a man and a woman, and the liberty of conscience.

New Anecdote

Dr Sasse was once asked in class by a seminary student if he thought it was a sin for a young man and his fiance to hold hands during church. Dr Sasse frowned and thought a while before answering, "I think it would be a sin", and he paused before proceeding, "if that young man and his fiance did NOT hold hands during church!".

The Inner Plight of Christendom

Contrary to the opinion of some church politicians, the failure of one church is by no means an opportunity for another. As the great persecutions of our century do not know any difference between the confessions, even if this at times appears to be the case, so the inner plight of Christendom too is basically everywhere the same. If the Protestant churches fail, then this does not mean that Catholicism has to rise, and vice versa (e.g., in Latin America). This is true for the relation between all churches, even within one denomination. The relation is not governed by the law of scales where the decline of the one means the ascent of the other, but rather by the law of communicating tubes in which increase and decrease of the level always correspond to each other. The greatest examples of this law are the Enlightenment of the 18th and the awakening of the 19th centuries. Behind this historical law stands the divine mystery of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church which lives hidden in, with, and under the earthly churches wherever the gospel and the sacraments of Christ are.
'Lambeth 1958', Letters to Lutheran Pastors Number 48
Translated by Holger Sonntag and published here with his kind permission.

Liturgy and Freedom to Order Ceremonies

“We Lutherans know nothing of liturgy that is prescribed by God’s Word. We know that the church has freedom to order its ceremonies and that it can therefore preserve the liturgical heritage of Christendom, as long as it is consistent with the Gospel. Indeed, our church in the Reformation placed the greatest value on preserving as much as possible this heritage that binds us with the fathers. But these ceremonies do not belong to the essence of the church or to the true unity of the church, as Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession and Article 10 of the Formula of Concord teach. Löhe knew this when in his Drei Bücher von der Kirche [Three Books on the Church], right where he speaks of the beauty and greatness of the Lutheran liturgy, he protests against overestimating it: ‘The church remains what she is even without liturgy. She remains a queen even when she is dressed as a beggar’ (Book 3, chap. 9 [p. 178]).”

The Lutheran Understanding of the Consecration
Letters to Lutheran Pastors Number 26, July 1952
Trans. by Norman Nagel, published in We Confess the Sacraments, Concordia, 1986, p.117.

Satis est

The great ‘It is enough’ (satis est) is clearly directed against Rome. For the unity of the church Rome required more than unity in the faith; it required the acceptance of human traditions and ceremonies. Satis est does not then postulate a minimum of agreement, a consensus, which we achieve in the course of our discussions, but a maximum: ‘. . . that [with one accord, einträchtiglich] the Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine Word.’ Not the agreement in doctrine—the Roman church has a consensus in doctrine, the Baptists also have one; every church has some sort of consensus, even if it is a consensus in agreeing that doctrine is not important—but only the consensus in the pure doctrine and in the right administration of the sacraments is the consensus demanded in the Augsburg Confession. That is the ‘great unanimity’ (magnus consensus) with which the first article of the Augsburg Confession begins, a consensus not made by men but given by God, the consensus in the right faith, which only the Holy Spirit creates.


From Article VII of the Augsburg Confession in the Present Crisis of Lutheranism, Letters to Lutheran Pastors, No. 53, April 1961, in We Confess the Church, trans. Norman Nagel, Concordia, 1986.

The English Church & Rome

At one point, the English church had been the most faithful daughter of Rome; the first Germanic church where the pope truly ruled and from where the continent was Romanized since Boniface; the church of the cult of St. Peter … and of pilgrimages to Rome. No people loved St. Peter as much as the English; no people was then humiliated as much as the English by the successors of St. Peter when Innocent III turned England into a papal fiefdom. Since then the “no popery,” the English equivalent of the German “away from Rome,” sounds forth through the history of England. Only think of Wycliffe’s polemics against the papacy as the antichrist who during the last years of Wycliffe’s life lived in Rome and in Avignon.

From Letters to Lutheran Pastors #48, "Lambeth 1958"
Translated by Holger Sonntag and posted here with his kind permission.

Anecdotes (Updated 20.10.09)

Progress on this blog may be slow for some time to come while I work on other projects - alas, I only have so much spare time at my disposal. Here are several anecdotes regarding Dr Sasse to tide you over until the next post.

A student cautiously approached Dr Sasse after chapel at Luther Seminary one day and nervously blurted out, "Dr Sasse, I have a problem." To which Dr Sasse replied, "Good!"

It was Dr Sasse's custom to take students from his classes at Luther Seminary in North Adelaide on what we might today call field trips to hear outdoor preachers in the nearby parks on a Saturday morning. One day, one of these preachers singled out Dr Sasse in the crowd and addressed him, "And what about you, Sir, have you found your Saviour!?" All eyes turned to Sasse, and he characteristically scratched the side of his nose with his index finger before replying in his thick German accent, "I did not know he was lost!"

Visitors to Dr Sasse's small residence in North Adelaide were often astonished to find several typewriters loaded with paper around the main room, each with a different essay or letter partly completed on it, some in English, some in German, some in Swedish. (What could he have done with a laptop and the internet?)

Seminary students assigned to tend the front garden of Dr Sasse's North Adelaide house after morning classes would invariably find themselves invited inside part way through the afternoon to share a bottle of Sauterne, a sickly sweet French wine. Did the gardening ever get finished?

In 1935, while a member of the stellar theological faculty in Erlangen, Sasse got into an ongoing debate in the religious press with his Erlangen colleague Hermann Strathmann over the extent to which Lutherans could co-operate with the Reformed in opposition to Hitler. The dispute was referred to among the faculty as "Die Hermann Schlacht", which translates as "The Battle of the Hermanns".

During World War 1, Sasse served in the German Army, reaching the rank of sergeant in the infantry. In the Battle of Passchendaele, which concluded in early November, 1917 with half a million casualties on both sides, Sasse earned the Iron Cross (2nd Class), the second highest battle honour in Germany at the time.