Sasse: Six Things for Lutherans to do in this New Year

This was posted by Rev. Matt Harrison 
President - Lutheran Church Missouri Synod 
Sasse: Six Things for Lutherans to do in this New Year

Is that really burying one’s talent if one does not enter into every fellowship of that kind? Did Luther bury his talent when he refused the hand of fellowship to Zwingli [at Marburg in 1529]? Did the Apostles do it when they refused to fellowship with the false teachers? We all wish to confess. We would also in humility instruct other fellow Christians and, wherever possible, learn from them. But to enter into fellowship in which truth and error are as a matter of principle placed on the same level in order to accomplish this end, that would be a denial which renders every confessing word illusory. Thus there will be Lutherans who feel compelled to decline absolutely the invitation to join the World Council of Churches and who can likewise not belong to the Lutheran World Federation as long as it indicates through its involvement with the World Council of Churches as well as through its own actions and communications that it does not take seriously, and perhaps with the best of intentions cannot take seriously, the Lutheran Confessions, which are its doctrinal basis.

And nothing in the last years has so served to clarify the position of Lutheranism and the true unity of the Church as did the manly resolution of Missouri not to join the Lutheran World Federation.[1] The Lutheran World Federation ought to sing a Te Deum in Minneapolis [at the assembly scheduled for 1957] for this clear confession which in the long view was the greatest service perhaps even to it. For now the world, which already saw the Lutheran Church being absorbed into the creedless Ecumenical Church, knows that there is still a church, or are still churches, which are not willing to surrender their doctrine, which are not minded to abandon the fundamental dogmas of the Christian faith to Rome. That was also a strengthening for many Reformed people who were completely isolated in their churches. It was for them a revival of the hope that God still has ways and means to preserve the old churches of the Reformation from being totally pulverized between Rome and sectarianism. It was an encouragement to do everything in our power to work for the preservation of the Lutheran Confessions.

But what can and must we now do? Let me in conclusion add a few words in answer to this question. The first thing which we have to do is to understand the situation in which the Lutheran Church finds itself today. We must see clearly, and we must pray God that he teach us to understand the times. It is one of those times of the Church when the casus confessionis (a case of confession) [F.C. S.D. X.1] has come, when not merely the confession of the mouth, but also confession by deed is demanded of us. As we had to confess our faith in the days of Hitler in Germany and silence constituted denial[2], so the time for remaining silent has come to an end for the rest of the faithful Lutherans today if we do not wish to become deniers of the truth. This is true particularly in America, where Lutheranism is being drawn into the stream of nationalism.

The second thing we have to do is repent. How could it ever come to this in the Lutheran Church? Where were we in the great hours of temptation? Why has confessionally loyal Lutheranism failed so? Why did it in the days of Hitler leave the confessing to others? Where was the voice, the warning voice of our American brethren, against Barmen and its untruthful and unLutheran “confession,” against the EKiD of 1948, against the World Council of Churches of that year?

Doubtless it was in many cases primarily a matter of noble discretion. There was no desire to mingle into the affairs of other churches. They wanted also to exercise Christian patience and to wait and see how things would develop. But on that account they often neglected to speak when the time for speaking had come. There also existed a theological uncertainty, at times also a lack of the gift of discerning the spirits. We all, the entire Lutheran Church, must repent. To this day every renewal of the Church has been born out of repentance, not out of accusations raised against others, but out of the genuine mea culpa, mea maxima culpa (the confession of sin: my fault, my own most grievous fault!) It is also well to consider that in the language of the New Testament the same word (homologein, confiteri) signifies the confession of faith and the confession of guilt.

The third thing which is demanded of us is faith and prayer. We believe that God can also revive sick churches, dying churches to new life. In our ordination vow there occurs the beautiful statement: “… and never to give up a soul as lost.” As we are to give up no soul in our congregation, no soul which has been entrusted to us, as lost, so we should give up no church as lost. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Lutheran Church according to human judgement seemed to be dead, even as it seemed in general as though the Christian faith had perished. Then God granted that wonderful revival on which basically even now everything that remains of Christianity in the world lives. He granted this revival to all churches in all countries, not only to Lutheranism. Who knows what, when God’s winds blow, may still emerge out of the Christian faith of other churches, which today is so deteriorated! God also can put our churches to shame by that which he does in other churches.

But whatever He may do, He does it in answer to prayer. Luther’s mighty prayer – that is the way his contemporaries in the year following his death regarded it – rescued the Church of the Reformation during the severe crisis in which it seemed doomed. Again, the revival of the nineteenth century was in answer to the prayers of the “quiet once in the land,” [Psalm 35:20][3] of the seven thousand who had not bowed their knees before the Baal [I Kings 19:18] of reason, just as even today there still exist the unseen people of God who do not worship the Baalim of our times.

The fourth thing that is demanded of us is love, concerning which many say that it is so frequently lacking among Lutherans. No the false love which cries peace where there is not peace [Jeremiah 6:14] and thereby also denies to the soul of the neighbor that peace which surpasses all human reason!

We mean the true love of the New Testament, the love  which can also use the sword (Matthew 10:34ff.), the love of John which says “no” to heresy (I John 4; 2 John 6ff.). Even when we must speak the clear, unambiguous “no” to many things which occur in the Lutheran churches of the world and in Christendom generally, and particularly when we have to say it with Lutheran clarity, we shall not want to cease loving those people whose errors we have to reject for the sake of the truth and with whom we therefore cannot have a communicatio in sacris, a pulpit and altar fellowship, even if they call themselves Lutherans.

The fifth thing we must do in order to understand the Confessions again is to study the Scriptures. As the Lutheran Church was born in the study of the exegete and preacher, in the interpretation and proclamation of the Word of God, so every renewal which has been granted to it has come out of immersion in the Scriptures. It is not true that the theologians of the nineteenth century discovered and “renewed” the confessional writing and then renovated the confessional Church on the basis of romantic feelings. On the contrary, the renovation was simply the rediscovery of the living content of Scripture, of the Gospel of the Crucified and Risen One, the living experience of justification. That is acknowledged generally by Vilmar in Hesse, and Goehrke and Knak in Pomerania, by Thamsius and Harless in Franconia. “Not till now,” writes Harless, “after I, at the hand of the Scriptures, have experienced and recognized the nature of saving truth, did I turn to the confessional writings of my Church. I can not describe the surprise and emotion with which I found that their content conformed with that of which I had become certain out of the Scriptures and out of the experience of faith.” That is the way in which people become Lutherans. It is no indication of soundness of our church that in so many Lutheran faculties, exegesis (interpretation of Scripture) is the weakest subject and the most important biblico-theological works of today are written in other than Lutheran churches.

The sixth thing we must learn in order to become Lutherans again is that we must do serious work in the history of dogma and in dogmatics. Certainly in this respect, the situation is much worse in other churches, as, for instance, the Anglican, not to speak at all of other denominations. That which is written today in the field of systematic theology in Protestantism is, in comparison with that of other periods in church history and with the work of the Roman Church (with a few exceptions, like Karl Barth) amateurish. There is in America a more or less intelligent philosophy of religion, like that of Niebuhr[4] and Tillich,[5] but it is not theology in the strict sense of the word.

But what about us? What a paucity of truly good theological literature! This is something which we who have the task of training young theologians by means of the English language know best. What is truly important is the Luther research going on in Germany and Scandinavia. But it too is only in its initial stage, in which it is not able to contribute much to dogmatics, to preaching, to the life of the Church, because it becomes too thoroughly mired in the purely historical and selects from the mass of material only that which pleases modern man in this era of existential philosophy. Is it scientifically justifiable to be compelled to read presentations of the theology of Luther in which Luther’s doctrine of the Sacraments is treated only in passing or not at all (e.g., the posthumous work of Johann von Walther, Die Theologie Luthers, 1940)? 

In the future we shall have to do our theological work in a much different manner in order to understand our Confessions anew. Nor dare we leave theology only to the professors, but we must give thought to the fact that in the Lutheran Church every pastor in his own right must be a theologian. A theologian, as we know, is not merely the representative of a professional science, but he is one who speaks God’s Word in the sermon and in his cure of souls and who carries on that praise of God which the ancient Church also called “theology.”

Let us never forget that the word “confession” has still a third meaning. Confiteri does not only mean the confession of faith, not only the confession of sin, but at the same time and always the praise of God. Not without good reason did Luther upon occasion count the Te Deum among the confessions of the church. A true confessional church is a church which in the midst of the distress of this world and in the midst of its own distress does not cease to sing: Te Deum laudamus, te Dominum confitemur, (“We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord.”).[6]

Affectionately yours in the faith and confession thus understood, honored brethren, and with best wishes for a blessed New Year,

Your,

Herman Sasse

Letters to Lutheran Pastors 43, "The Confessional Problem in Today's World Lutheranism" (1956). President John Behnken had this piece translated and it was published in the Lutheran Laymen's League newspaper!  M.H.

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[1] See Sasse’s “Missouri and the Lutheran World Federation” (n.p., n.d.) [31 Jul 1958?], typed mss., 22 pp. Feuerhahn Bibliography no. 58-03. Also, “Concerning the Nature of the Lutheran World Federation” (n.p., n.d.) [June 1963?] mimeographed, 3pp. Feuerhahn Bibliography no. 63-04. MH

[2] Sasse was editor of the Kirchlisches Jahrbuch, the general annual for all Protestant churches

In Germany  in 1932. He published the first open churchly rejection of the Nazi party platform, particularly the Aryan paragraph (24).  MH

[3] For they speak not peace: but they devise deceitful matters against them that are quiet in the land. Psalm 35:20, KJV. MH

[4] Reinhold Niebuhr 1892-1971, American writer and theologian on ethical and social problems. From 1928 he was professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Influenced by Barth and more by E. Brunner. For a generation his “Christian realism” exercised an influential critique on American social and political institutions. ODCC p. 1153.

[5] Paul Tillich 1886-1965, like Sasse, served in WWI as an army chaplain. Left German in 1933 for the U.S. Professor of philosophical theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Sought to answer the questions of culture in terms of existentialism, ontology, and Jungian philosophy. ODCC p. 1622. MH

[6] The topic of the nature of confession had long occupied Sasse’s thought and work. See “The Church’s Confession” (1930) translated by Matthew Harrison, Logia 1.1 (Reformation Oct 1992) 3-8. Feuerhahn Bibliography no. 056.