This was published April 17, 2010 — Ed.

Driving through Indiana yesterday we saw this sign, a cheery invitation for visitors to Cornerstone Church: New Pastor! Fresh Approach!

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This approaching Sunday, May 3, is the great feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross. Sometimes also called the Invention of the Holy Cross, as a transliteration of the Latin title, Inventio Sanctae Crucis, this feast commemorates the discovery of the Holy Cross by St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, and is not to be confused with the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (September 14th), which commemorates the dedication of the original Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, as well as the recovery of the cross some centuries later.

Luther and Melanchthon on the Feasts of the Holy Cross

Both feasts of the Holy Cross faced no small opposition following the Reformation, with Dr. Luther saying in his 1523 Formula Missae (emphasis my own):

We think that all the feasts of the saints should be abrogated, or if anything in them deserves it, it should be brought into the Sunday sermon. We regard the feasts of Purification and Annunciation as feasts of Christ, even as Epiphany and Circumcision. Instead of the feasts of St. Stephen and of St. John the Evangelist, we are pleased to use the office of the Nativity. The feasts of the Holy Cross shall be anathema. Let others act according to their own conscience or in consideration of the weakness of some — whatever the Spirit may suggest. (AE 53:23)

“There you have it!” the iconoclastically-inclined reader crows, “the festivals of the cross are anathema and should by no means be celebrated, nor the feasts of the apostles or St. Stephen, or any others.” This would, of course, fly in the face of all of Lutheran history and the Lutheran Confessions.

But rather than building a house on the tiniest sliver of a phrase, let’s take a further look at Dr. Luther’s own words. In the 1527 Festpostille, Luther expands on his thoughts in his sermon on the Finding of the Holy Cross:

First, there is the practice of paying great reverence to the holy cross. This is the reason that it is gilded with silver and gold. This in itself I do not reproach. But I attack the abuse that results. For many simple people are seduced by this and go astray. They run here and there to the holy cross, up to Torgau, down to Dresden, and wherever else they go, to these crosses upon which Christ has never suffered…You dream in error that the cross in Torgau works this for you and the other one somewhere else cannot….

Therefore where this abuse and error occurs in the worship of images and the cross, the cross or picture should be removed and destroyed and even the Church building itself be demolished. I would not entirely do away with images and especially the figure of the crucified Christ. For we have in the Old Testament this figure of the bronze snake commanded in the wilderness by Moses, as you just heard in the Gospel. All who were bitten by the fiery snakes were cured when they looked up to the bronze snake. That is what we also must do to be healed in our sins. We must also look at the crucified Christ in such images and believe on Him. But when the Jews began to pray to the snake as a god, and no longer regarded it as just a symbol, the good Hezekiah went ahead and destroyed it.

Our bishops and prelates should do the same with these images if one of them is sought in that way. They should do away with those churches and everything in them. But what do they do now? They go and dedicate more churches and images and also perpetuate the idolatry. They place a heavy burden on the people. They do it to gain money, and unfortunately, souls for themselves. What can one say? They are wolves and remain wolves.

The other abuse: It might be that a few places have a little piece of the holy cross, but there are so many pieces everywhere that a great house could be made of them. And yet they are all considered as if they were from the cross of Christ. That is also, then, not a small dishonor committed against the holy cross. It would be better that it had never been found. It only gives occasion for great sins and idolatry. (trans. Joel R. Baseley in Luther’s Festival Sermons, Dearborn, MI: Mark V Publications, 2005)

Luther’s primary concern — really, his only concern — is the idolatry and abuse associated with relics. He does not object to paying reverence to the cross, to gilding it in silver and gold, but rather to placing one’s confidence in any created thing, even the wood of the cross itself. While voicing skepticism about the veracity of some of the relics of the cross, he doesn’t seem to doubt at all that the cross itself was, in fact, found by St. Helena — that seems quite obvious to him, even as he rues the abuses that have resulted. The human heart is, in the end, the true manufacturer of idols, and can turn even the gifts of God into idols, whether the bronze serpent or the wood of the cross.

Luther spends the remainder of this section speaking at length about how this feast ought to instruct us on bearing our own crosses, but I will, for the sake of brevity, provide only the conclusion and leave the rest for your perusal:

For just as our works do not save us, so also our cross or suffering does not save us. Christ alone is our salvation. He has established it with His death and cross. So you believe that you are saved and have eternal life. You must be brought to it through your death as through a door, so you also must, for that reason, patiently suffer the cross. By that your neighbor will also be incited to bear his cross patiently. In that way we rightly celebrate the discovery of the holy cross and this feast must comfort us in affliction. But now, the way we celebrate it, it would have been better that the cross had never been discovered or lifted up so that we parade around with it like children playing with sticks. God grant that we once more confess our offense and that He give us a right understanding of the matter. Christ Jesus our Savior help us in this. Amen.

Later on in the same postil, on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (September 14th), Luther speaks again at length about the use and abuse of the holy cross, though a brief excerpt will suffice:

Churches are endowed with the wood upon which Christ died and this cross is then displayed with other external decorations, with gold, silver, and jewels even to the point that it is dripping with them. Throughout Wittenberg, also, even the monastery is endowed with the crown of thorns and many fees and rents are woven into it, which is not the right use nor the right kind of veneration. Now if you would want to trample the holy cross that would not be good. That it be honored is fine. But that you would fall down in worship upon it, establish churches for it, set the soul’s salvation upon it and forget about the true cross which is more necessary, is wrong.

Dr. Luther says, as before, that the holy cross itself is worthy of honor, but the relics of the cross have become the center of a multitude of abuses.

In his postil, Philipp Melanchthon, quite characteristically, refrains from Luther’s thunderous condemnations, but voices a matter-of-fact belief that St. Helena did, in fact, find the Holy Cross, and spends most of his time speaking at length about the historical circumstances surrounding its finding and restoration:

Helena, the mother of Constantine, had the Cross of Christ sought for, and is said to have found it. Be it so; she is said to have found it in Jerusalem. I believe that it happened. It does not please me to mock all histories. There is a certain diligence, especially fitting for a woman. She was one of those women who came to anoint Christ. If I were a free man and able to travel, I would most of all wish to see those very places where the Son of God left his footprints, and where such great revelations of God were made. (Corpus Reformatorum, XXV:498ff.)

The two feasts of the Holy Cross would be continue to be rather sporadically featured in Lutheran postils for the next two hundred years, including that of Valerius Herberger, but we now turn our attention to the liturgical material.

The Mass and Office for the Finding of the Holy Cross in Early Lutheran Use

The 1589 Missale for the use of the Havelberg Cathedral, authored by Matthaeus Ludecus, includes a full mass for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Ludecus, the dean of the cathedral and editor of this volume, was sometimes prone to long prefaces for various masses, variously extolling the virtues of the feast or denouncing the abuses that have now been put to rest. Somewhat notably, in spite of the heated words of Dr. Luther regarding this feast, no lengthy preface is included prior to this feast, seemingly indicating no need for explanation. The only note at the beginning of the mass is this marginal reference: Socrates Scholasticus, lib. I, cap. 17, directing the reader to the following passage:

Helena, the emperor's mother (from whose name having made Drepanum, once a village, a city, the emperor called it Helenopolis), being divinely directed by dreams went to Jerusalem. Finding that which was once Jerusalem, desolate 'as a Preserve for autumnal fruits,' according to the prophet, she sought carefully the sepulchre of Christ, from which he arose after his burial; and after much difficulty, by God's help she discovered it. What the cause of the difficulty was I will explain in a few words. Those who embraced the Christian faith, after the period of his passion, greatly venerated this tomb; but those who hated Christianity, having covered the spot with a mound of earth, erected on it a temple to Venus, and set up her image there, not caring for the memory of the place. This succeeded for a long time; and it became known to the emperor's mother.

Accordingly she having caused the statue to be thrown down, the earth to be removed, and the ground entirely cleared, found three crosses in the sepulchre: one of these was that blessed cross on which Christ had hung, the other two were those on which the two thieves that were crucified with him had died. With these was also found the tablet of Pilate, on which he had inscribed in various characters, that the Christ who was crucified was king of the Jews. Since, however, it was doubtful which was the cross they were in search of, the emperor's mother was not a little distressed; but from this trouble the bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, shortly relieved her. And he solved the doubt by faith, for he sought a sign from God and obtained it. The sign was this: a certain woman of the neighborhood, who had been long afflicted with disease, was now just at the point of death; the bishop therefore arranged it so that each of the crosses should be brought to the dying woman, believing that she would be healed on touching the precious cross. Nor was he disappointed in his expectation: for the two crosses having been applied which were not the Lord's, the woman still continued in a dying state; but when the third, which was the true cross, touched her, she was immediately healed, and recovered her former strength. In this manner then was the genuine cross discovered.

The emperor's mother erected over the place of the sepulchre a magnificent church, and named it New Jerusalem, having built it facing that old and deserted city. There she left a portion of the cross, enclosed in a silver case, as a memorial to those who might wish to see it: the other part she sent to the emperor, who being persuaded that the city would be perfectly secure where that relic should be preserved, privately enclosed it in his own statue, which stands on a large column of porphyry in the forum called Constantine's at Constantinople. I have written this from report indeed; but almost all the inhabitants of Constantinople affirm that it is true. Moreover the nails with which Christ's hands were fastened to the cross (for his mother having found these also in the sepulchre had sent them) Constantine took and had made into bridle-bits and a helmet, which he used in his military expeditions. The emperor supplied all materials for the construction of the churches, and wrote to Macarius the bishop to expedite these edifices.

When the emperor's mother had completed the New Jerusalem, she reared another church not at all inferior, over the cave at Bethlehem where Christ was born according to the flesh: nor did she stop here, but built a third on the mount of his Ascension. So devoutly was she affected in these matters, that she would pray in the company of women; and inviting the virgins enrolled in the register of the churches to a repast, serving them herself, she brought the dishes to table. She was also very munificent to the churches and to the poor; and having lived a life of piety, she died when about eighty years old. Her remains were conveyed to New Rome, the capital, and deposited in the imperial sepulchres.

Again, our fathers in the faith seemed not to have the slightest doubt about the historical veracity of the finding of the cross by St. Helena, but only protest against the later abuses that so readily spring up in the human heart.

The mass itself begins with the Introit Nos autem gloriari, as on Maundy Thursday, and the Epistle is from Galatians 5:10–12; 6:12–14. Following the Epistle is an Alleluia drawn from the Fortunatus hymn Pange lingua gloriosi [praelium certaminis], after which is added in a number of sources (and assumed in still more sources) Pascha nostrum, ubiquitous throughout Eastertide:

Sweet the wood and sweet the nails:
Sweet the burden that thou bearest;
Which alone was counted worthy
To bear the King and Lord of heaven.

Alleluia. ℣ Christ our Passover, is sacrificed for us.
Let us keep the feast with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, alleluia.

After the Alleluia is sung Laudes crucis attolamus, the stunning sequence hymn by Adam of St. Victor. If the melody of the sequence seems vaguely familiar, that is because it shares a melody with Lauda Sion salvatorem, the sequence hymn for Corpus Christi, which gave rise to the melody for Gott sei gelobet und gebenedeiet, more familiar to us as the Eucharistic hymn “O Lord, We Praise Thee.” The sequence beautifully recounts the types and foreshadowings of the cross in the Old Testament, from Jacob’s ladder and the wood that sweetened the waters at Marah to the staff of Moses that struck the rock and the sign of the cross made by the blood of the lamb over the doorposts on the night of the Passover. A slight abridgement is provided in English translation below.

Be the Cross our theme and story,
We who in the Cross's glory
Shall exult for evermore.
By the Cross the warrior rises,
By the Cross the foe despises,
Till he gains the heavenly shore…

Ladder this, to sinners given,
Whereby Christ, the King of Heaven,
Drew to Him both friends and foes:
Who its nature hath expended
In its limits comprehended
All the world's four quarters knows.

No new Sacraments we mention;
We devise no fresh invention:
This religion was of old;
Wood made sweet the bitter current,
Wood called forth the rushing torrent
From the smitten rock that rolled.

No salvation for the mansion
Where the Cross in meet expansion
On the door-post stood not graved:
Where it stood, the midnight blast
Of the avenging Angel passed,
And the first-born child was saved.

Wood the widow's hands collected,
When salvation unexpected
Came, the Prophet's mystic boon:
Where the wood of faith is wanted,
There the Spirit's oil is scanted,
And the meal is wasted soon…

Types of old in Scripture hidden
Setting forth the Cross, are bidden,
In these days, to fuller light;
Kings are flying, foes are dying,
On the Cross of Christ relying
One a thousand puts to flight.

This its votaries still secureth,
Victory evermore assureth,
Weakness and diseases cureth,
Triumphs o'er the powers of hell:
Satan's captives liberateth,
Life in sinners renovateth,
All in glory reinstateth
Who by ancient Adam fell.

Tree, triumphal might possessing,
Earth's salvation, crown, and blessing,
Every other prætergressing
Both in bloom and bud and flower:
Medicine of the Christian spirit,
Save the just, give sinners merit,
Who dost might for deeds inherit
Overpassing human power.

The plainsong with English text can be found in Mr. Matthew Carver’s Lutheran Sequences. As is the case with many of the Victorine sequences, some portions of the text are in 887 887 meter, and can be set to the familiar melody Alles ist an Gottes segen (cf. TLH 282).

The Gospel is John 3:1–15, the same text appointed for Trinity Sunday, in which Our Lord speaks to Nicodemus of His crucifixion: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” Though Ludecus does not specify the Proper Preface that ought to be said, the nearly universal medieval use prescribed the Passiontide preface (“…who on the tree of the cross didst give salvation unto mankind, that whence death arose, thence life also might rise again…”), which would have been quite obvious to his original readers.

While Ludecus’ Missale of 1589 had no prefatory note, his Vesperale has a brief note referring the reader to the Tripartite History, book II, chapter 18, and to Ambrose’s funeral sermon for Emperor Theodosius, but taking care above all to note that the language used in the hymns and chants for the occasion referring to the cross is metonymy, and is truly understood as referring to the crucified. Interestingly enough, this mirrors a common medieval rubric on Good Friday at the veneration of the cross, seemingly derived from Honorius of Autun’s Gemma Animae, III.96: Et nullus sapiens crucem, sed Christum crucifixum adorat, crucem tamen venerando salutat. “And no one who is wise ‘adores’ the cross but Christ crucified; rather he hails the cross with veneration.” (PL 172:667) The piety of the Christian is not directed toward the cross itself, but toward the Crucified, and Ludecus would like to be certain that his readers understand that with clarity rather than falling into the errors denounced by Dr. Luther above.

The liturgical formulae provided for the occasion continue onward with the existing pre-Reformation texts, and so the antiphon for the psalms at first vespers is Helena desiderio: “Helena, full of longing, prayed with tears, saying: ‘Show Thou, O Lord, the wood on which our salvation was hung, alleluia.’ ”

Before we leave Ludecus behind, I cannot help but include an excerpt of the funeral oration by St. Ambrose for Theodosius that he referenced. It is truly beautiful.

How fortunate was Constantine to have a mother like this, who when her son was emperor sought for him the support of divine protection, that he might take his place in battles unharmed, and be without fear of danger! How great was the woman, seeing that she found something to bestow on the emperor, which was very much greater than anything she could receive from him! A mother anxious for a son to whom rule of the Roman world had fallen, she sped to Jerusalem, and thoroughly examined the scene of the Lord's passion.

They claim that she was originally the hostess of an inn, and as such known to the elder Constantius, who subsequently obtained imperial office. Good hostess, who so painstakingly searched for the manger of the Lord! Good hostess, who knew about that inn-keeper who cared for the wounds of he man set upon by robbers! Good hostess, who preferred to be esteemed as dung in order to win Christ! That is why Christ raised her from the dung to royalty, according to what is written, that He ‘raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the dung.’

So Helena came, she began to visit the holy places once more. The Holy Spirit inspired her to search for the wood of the Cross. She approached close to Golgotha, and said: 'Behold, the place of combat, but where is the victory? I am looking for the banner of salvation, but I cannot find it. Am I,' she said, 'to be with kings, while the cross of the Lord lies in the dust? Am I to have gold all round me, while the triumph of Christ lies among rubble? While this object remains hidden, so does the palm of eternal life! How can I consider myself redeemed, if redemption itself is not visible?

I see what you have done, Satan, to make sure that the sword which destroyed you was covered up. But Isaac dug out the wells, which had been covered up by foreigners, and did not permit the water to lie hidden. Therefore let the rubble be shifted so that life may be seen; let the sword be displayed by which the head of the true Goliath was cut off, let the earth be opened up so that salvation may shine forth. What did you achieve, Satan, by hiding the wood, other than to suffer a second defeat? Mary defeated you, when she gave birth to the conqueror, when without any impairment to her virginity she brought Him forth, who was crucified to conquer you, who died to subject you. You will be defeated again today, when a woman uncovers your snares. The holy one bore the Lord, I shall search for His cross. She gave proof of His birth, I shall give proof of His resurrection. She caused God to be seen among men; I shall raise the divine banner from the rubble to be a remedy for our sins.'

So she opens up the earth; she clears away the soil; she lays bare three forked gibbets tangled together, which rubble had covered up, and the Enemy had concealed. But the triumph of Christ could not be effaced. Doubtfully, she hesitates, woman-like she hesitates, but the Holy Spirit inspires a particular line of investigation, because of the fact that two thieves had been crucified with the Lord. So she picks out the middle piece of wood; but it was possible that the rubble had jumbled up the crosses and accidentally interchanged their positions. She goes back to the Gospel passage, she finds that on the middle gibbet there had been an inscription: ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.’ From this, a true line of reasoning was deduced: the inscription revealed the cross of salvation. This is what Pilate answered to the Jews when they protested: ‘What I have written, I have written’ that is: 'I have not written these things to please you, but that future ages may know them, I have not written for you, but for posterity.' He was virtually saying, 'Let Helena have something to read, by which she can identify the cross of the Lord.'

So now, she found the inscription; she adored the king — most definitely not the wood, for this is Gentile error and the folly of the impious, but she adored Him, who hung on the tree, whose name was cited on the inscription, who like a scarab cried out so that His Father might forgive the sins of His persecutors. Eagerly the woman was in a hurry to touch the elixir of immortality, yet she was afraid to trample on the mystery of salvation. With joyful heart but hesitant footstep, she did not know what to do; she nevertheless made her way towards the resting place of truth. The wood shone, and grace sparkled, because just as previously Christ had visited a woman in the person of Mary, so now the Spirit visited a woman in the person of Helena. He taught her what being a woman she did not know, and led her on to a path that could not be known by any mortal. (translated by J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz in Ambrose of Milan: Political Letters and Speeches, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005)

You can see even in the time of St. Ambrose of Milan that there is a special concern to direct Christian piety not to the cross, but to the Crucified, a theme which is echoed again and again in the Lutheran fathers, who stand firmly on the shoulders of the ancients in this regard.

The Feasts of the Cross in Recent History

Given all the preceding, the next chapter is, quite frankly, rather strange. The May 3rd feast of the Finding of the Holy Cross feast disappears from view, and we instead find the September 14th feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross appearing in the Missouri Synod in most editions of the Kirchen-Gesangbuch from 1880 onward with the name “Tag der Kreuzes-Erhöhung.” It is then absent in English language sources for nearly a century, missing from the Evangelical Lutheran-Hymn Book (1892 and 1918) and The Lutheran Hymnal (1941).

The Exaltation of the Holy Cross only resurfaces in The Church Year: Calendar and Lectionary (1973), the sixth volume in the Contemporary Worship series (a series of pamphlets with test materials from the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship), now with the name “Holy Cross Day.” A footnote in this volume notes that Holy Cross “is a popular title for Lutheran churches,” and that since it falls close to the beginning of the academic year, “it presents the opportunity for relating schools and colleges to the cross of Christ.” Nowhere is it noted that this is, in fact, a traditional feast day among at least some American Lutherans, and in a further sign of the disconnect of the ILCW from the liturgical heritage of the Lutheran Church, the footnote concludes by noting that “in the Roman calendar this day is called The Triumph of the Cross.” A cursory look at preceding Lutheran books would have quickly revealed that this naming tradition is also the one present in Lutheran use, if in a slightly differing translation. The appointed readings for the day also reveal a lack of familiarity with Lutheran precedent. While the texts appointed in KELG (and most of Western tradition) are Philippians 2:5–11 and John 12:31–36, The Church Year: Calendar and Lectionary instead assigns 1 Corinthians 1:18–24 and a different cutting of the Gospel (John 12:20–33), neither of which seems to be found in any Lutheran — or, in fact, any other sources at all prior to this date — which is made all the more bewildering by the clear borrowing of the Collect (a new composition by Massey H. Shepherd), Psalm and Old Testament reading (Psalm 98:1–4 and Isaiah 45:21–25, respectively) from the Episcopal Church’s 1970 Services for Trial Use (sometimes called the “Green Book”). Ignoring one’s own heritage and borrowing haphazardly from everywhere else is, alas, an all-too-familiar pattern in the LBW project and its predecessors, but this is just…odd.

The feast then officially enters the English-language hymnals of American Lutherans with the aforementioned propers largely in place in Lutheran Book of Worship (1978) and Lutheran Worship (1982), though LBW further waters down and neuters the Massey Shepherd collect, and LW replaces it altogether with “Merciful and everlasting God the Father…” (no. 29), also said in that volume on Wednesday of Holy Week. Thus we arrive at Lutheran Service Book (2006), which largely adopts the propers as found in LW, though it replaces the Isaiah 45 Prophecy with one from Numbers 21 — fittingly depicting the “lifting up” of the bronze serpent — and lengthens the Epistle by one (1) verse.

In some ways, the history of this feast over the last 150 years serves as a living, breathing, mangled testament to the influence of modernity. The feast disappears from view after the transition from the German liturgical tradition, and then is resurrected 100 years later….with almost completely different texts. The outward form is retained, but the substance is almost entirely changed. A set of texts is proposed seemingly out of thin air in 1973, adjusted in 1978, again in 1982, and is revised once again in 2006. But it’s hardly the exception, and really is the rule — you might be familiar with the Roman Catholic three-year lectionary that was invented in 1969, spawned a decade of chaotic and competing revisions finally consolidated in the Common Lectionary in 1983, only to be replaced with the Revised Common Lectionary in 1992, but which exists in LSB (2006) as a revision of the 1982 Lutheran Worship lectionary, which predates both the Common Lectionary and the Revised Common Lectionary. And all this under the guise of “Christian unity” and “ecumenism,” of course. Who could argue with that?

Well……

Or maybe we could step back from the chaos. Learn from and listen to our fathers in the faith. Root our traditions in the wisdom of the ages, sharing in the joy of Helena and the poetic beauty of Ambrose, paring back the abuses with Luther, reading the history of the nations and how it intersects with the story of salvation alongside Melanchthon, or singing and reading Holy Scripture with Adam of St. Victor while saying mass with Ludecus and C.F.W. Walther.

But we could also go with the tradition that thinks it’s really nice to have Holy Cross Day because it happens near the beginning of the academic year. Those two traditions definitely seem equally valid and profound.

Right?

Friend, colleague, and GC guy, Fr. Weedon has compiled a handy list of quotations from our Lutheran fathers concerning our liturgical heritage. Well worth printing off and sharing with a board of elders, etc.

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In our polity in the LCMS, we have episkope but not episkopoi. In other words, we have ordained men charged with oversight (episkope) of pastors and congregations, but they are not bishops (episkopoi). They are “presidents.” It’s a bit of an unfortunate turn of phrase, as a president is one who presides over a parliamentary meeting. Our district and synod presidents do this, but they have other tasks as well in addition to chairing the triennial conventions.

They are not bishops (even if they are given the honorific of “bishop”), as bishops of Lutheran (and non-Lutheran) church bodies around the world are. Our presidents are elected by delegates at a convention. And they serve three-year terms and must be re-elected. This is not like the episcopal service of the apostles, the apostolic fathers, or historic bishops cited in our confessions, men like Leo, Gregory, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, or Augustine. Nor is it like the service of more recent Lutheran bishops, like the sainted Bo Giertz.

To a certain extent, we ask the impossible of them. In the words of C.S. Lewis: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.” We remove the eposkopoi, but we demand episkope. For the former is an adiaphoron (at least when the term is used in the sense of polity and not in the sense of the pastoral office), but the latter is not. We tell a man to do the right thing, and then we make him stand for re-election at the hands of the very people he has to oversee and discipline.

Or to put it into terms a pastor might understand: Can you imagine if you did not have a call (as our presidents don’t), but instead had to be re-elected by the voters’ assembly every three years? How might your ministry be different? What if a husband or father were subjected to a triennial re-election campaign? It is a bit like comparing a professor who has tenure vs. one who does not. Certainly, the professor who has tenure can afford to be a little more bold than one who has to get good ratings from his students or he will lose his job by which he supports his family.

And, of course, our polity is experimental, innovative, and recent in the long history of the church. The jury is still out as to whether or not it can work. We have what we have partially because during the Reformation in Germany (over and against the Reformation in Sweden), there were no extant German bishops who would join with the Lutherans (co-called) - at least not at first. The other thing that happened was in 19th century America: the deposition of the Rev. Martin Stephan and the replacement of that old-world hierarchical polity with a new-world kind of hybrid hierarchical and democratic-republican model. We have replaced the ecumenical council with the convention, and we have redefined the word “synod” from its ancient, longstanding, and universal meaning of a gathering of bishops into a 501 (c) (3) corporate organization governed by a convention of roughly half pastors and half laymen of both sexes under the auspices of Robert’s Rules and the collective will of the parliamentary body by appeal to the majority, seeking the “vox Dei” not in God’s Word, butrather in the “vox populi.” And this is the process by which the Lutheran Church in Australia came to establish Satanic priestesses in what used to be Christian churches. In their case, the vox populi was the vox diaboli. The delegates were once again asked, “Did God actually say?” and the Eves and Adams in the voting assembly fell for it all over again.

Concerning how we govern ourselves, our confessions express not just a preference for episcopal polity, but that it is our “greatest wish”:

Concerning this subject we have frequently testified in this assembly that it is our greatest wish to maintain church-polity and the grades in the Church [old church-regulations and the government of bishops], even though they have been made by human authority [provided the bishops allow our doctrine and receive our priests]. For we know that church discipline was instituted by the Fathers, in the manner laid down in the ancient canons, with a good and useful intention.
— Apology 14:24 (emphasis added).

But that said, we were dealt two historical hands that have left us with what we have: the German Reformation and the American Innovation. And in general, we make it work - especially at the parish level, where for the most part, we are free to preach the Gospel and administer the Sacraments unmolested by our own hierarchy in parish and in district (with some exceptions - yes, many of us have “war stories”).

So being a district president has its own unique challenges - just as being a pastor does in our parademocratic form of congregational polity. It is what it is. But we do remunerate our district presidents well, provide them with full benefits, and none of them (to my knowledge) has a two-point district or are moonlighting at Home Depot. They are paid well, as they should be - given the level of responsibility that goes with episkope.

All that said, there is something I don’t understand regarding presidential episkope. And that thing I don’t understand is why some of them apparently need to have pastors jump through hoops before they will address public and unambiguous issues of oversight.

By way of example, district presidents, consider the hypothetical of a pastor in your district (let’s call him Smith) posting to social media - in multiple places and without ambiguity - that he doesn’t believe in the Trinity, or the Two Natures of Christ, or Baptismal Regeneration, or the Real Presence in the Eucharist - take your pick. I’m not talking about a whispered rumor, but an unambiguous public declaration in the words of my U.S. Senator from Louisiana, “As big as Dallas.”

Now if this happens, and you have oversight over this pastor - would you require some other pastor (let’s call him Jones) to first contact and confront Pastor Smith, initiate the bylaw launch sequence, and follow up with a face-to-face meeting and submit the notes to you - before you are permitted to take action? Would you really be powerless to call Smith yourself, to question him, or even to suspend him, unless and until some Pastor Jones out there stepped up to jump through the hoops? What if Jones is a husband and father and doesn’t make district scale and has to work a side hustle? What if he is already serving a dual parish? What if he can’t really afford the time to go on a paper chase, or if he lives a long way away and can’t afford to get on a plane or drive however far to seek out Smith for some kind of face-to-face meeting (which might not even happen)? Why can’t the district president just have the face-to-face meeting with Smith himself?

I know of the case of the Valparaiso professor who was removed from the LCMS roster, but only after a fellow pastor had to practically move heaven and earth to get the ball rolling. Why? And if the district president were harboring someone who was teaching heresy - not some kind of gray area - why was that district president himself not held accountable?

The best construction is that all of our presidents are are good men who really do practice oversight, but are inhibited and held captive by our polity.

If you really are powerless to remove a guy who holds and teaches unscriptural views without a Pastor Jones to cross the tees and dot the “ayes,” doesn’t this strike you as a problem? Shouldn’t fixing this be the top of the agenda for your COP meetings and for the synod Board of Directors? But, to be honest (and doesn’t the Eighth Commandment include “not telling lies”?), I’m having a hard time believing that your hands really are tied to such an extent. Because it seems to me that if a pastor were (in the words of a former governor of Louisiana) “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy” (yes, Louisiana is a politically colorful place), you wouldn’t need Pastor Jones to do something. Or worse yet, if one of your pastors declared bankruptcy. Rumor has it that this is the one unforgivable zero-tolerance sin for pastors. Everything else is negotiable.

So I’m skeptical that district presidents’ hands really are tied when it comes to disciplining pastors who believe, teach, and confess unbiblical doctrines. Maybe the best construction is that there are unseen political and financial considerations that get in the way and complicate matters.

Now, I don’t know of any current LCMS pastors who deny the Trinity. But there certainly have been some recently who have promoted women’s “ordination.” I’ve even seen resolutions put forth in convention workbooks to that effect. Why? Why should this be permitted? Why is this any different than denying the Trinity? This is biblical doctrine, not something that a convention has the right to vote on. I was once at a district convention in which a lady delegate argued that we could ordain women if we wanted to, but we just chose not to. The district president at the time, who was presiding over the meeting, did not correct her. I understand that he could not have done so as the chairman presiding over the convention, but he could have temporarily recused himself from the chair (as Robert’s Rules allows) and briefly confessed the biblical doctrine from the floor. He could have asked for a point of personal privilege to clarify our doctrine. He did not. Do we subject doctrine to the ayes and nays like they did in Australia, where they now have lady “pastors” by virtue of a certain number of votes? Is that our system of polity? And if it isn’t, why can such a resolution even be proposed to a convention with impunity? What if it had passed?

Can anyone explain to me how a resolution that, on its face, contradicts Scripture or the confessions is even permitted to be sent up the chain, published, discussed, debated, and voted on? Anyone? Class? Bueller?

So if a pastor were to openly promote women’s “ordination,” or advocate for homosexual “pride” parades, or speak in favor of transgender ideology - all of which are contrary to scripture - why are these pastors not being overseen and disciplined? If they persist in such false doctrine, why are they not removed? How can pastors speak of a man’s “husband” or call for same-sex couples to be allowed to commune because they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong? Why are they able to believe, teach, and confess unbiblical teachings with impunity? Are you waiting for Pastor Jones to fill out the right paperwork or something? I honestly don’t get it.

Maybe it is my own ignorance of the bylaws. But if our bylaws truly don’t allow district presidents to oversee, to exercise discipline, then not only are they not episkopoi, nor to they really exercise episkope either. And if that is the case, then I think that our district presidents should exercise a kind of de facto episkope by publicly condemning certain men and certain churches by name, and warning the faithful against them. St. Paul did this in his epistles - even mentioning false teachers by name. So do our Lutheran confessions. If you can’t remove a false teacher from the roster because of the burden of bureaucracy and bylaw complications, you can at least be the prophetic voice of the watchman on the wall. It does seem to be your job. Have I missed something?

But if you do and say nothing, you are giving tacit approval. And I cannot tell you how crushing this is to the morale of the pastors and laity who deal with the fallout of such things. These are not private sins between pastors. This is not a case of Pastor Smith selling a truck to Pastor Jones that had an unrevealed transmission problem. Such a case should not be settled in Caesar’s courts. That kind of dispute should be settled Christian to Christian, and if necessary, in a separate ecclesiastical forum: a dispute resolution process within the church. But public false doctrine is a different story. It seems to me to be the top reason why the office of district president exists.

In matters of publicly confessed doctrine, the dispute resolution process seems to be the wrong vehicle. For there can be no dispute resolution where there is no dispute. Are doctrines like the Trinity, the Two Natures, male-only ordination, opposite sex monogamy, and creation as male and female really a matter of dispute, up for grabs, and subject to the most votes in convention? In matters where there is ambiguity, where the facts are not clear, or in cases where an appeal is in order - then there should be due process and protection for the accused. That said, the onus should not be on Pastor Jones, who already has enough on his plate, and who is not charged with exercising episkope.

Those who teach contrary to God’s Word should be removed from the roster. That should not be a controversial statement. And if we can’t do that, our polity will be judged as a failure by generations yet to be born. For unless we can remove the cancer of false doctrine, we will simply become just one more counterfeit body like the ELCA and the NALC, from which true Christian pastors and congregations have to flee in order to remain faithful to the Word of God.

And before someone misconstrues my hard questions, I am really sincere when I say that our district presidents have a difficult task - especially within the parameters of our polity. And I know several of our district presidents personally, and know them to be honorable men. In fact, I’m really encouraged at how many of them I do know - either in person or by reputation - and I rejoice that they are there: including my own district president. But there is clearly something broken and dysfunctional that needs to be fixed - whether it is the polity, the bureaucracy, or the culture of oversight - within our synod.

I invite any of our district presidents to comment.

The above video is a current marketing strategy of the Roman Catholic Church called “Catholics Come Home.” It is well done - while, of course, being propagandistic (the word “propaganda,” interestingly, has its etymological origins in the Roman Catholic Church’s evangelism agency founded in 1622, “The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.”

And this is the point of my sharing it.

The theological and historical errors notwithstanding, this is a beautiful piece of propaganda, and it is valuable in that sense. For as the Rev. Bryan Stecker points out, the digital footprint of the Roman Catholic Church dwarfs anything that we are doing . They are massive and rich, and have access to resources that we don’t (in fact, I saw this ad on a restaurant TV that was showing the Winter Olympics). It cost them a fortune to air this. And that is the point. What you see in the above video is exactly what their marketing folks understand that people are looking for, and they are heavily invested in telling that story. This video has been released in many languages, as people all over the world are seeking out a kind of Christianity that is genuine, serious, beautiful, grounded in antiquity, historical, unified and universal, active in the world, and making a difference.

Being a marketing tool, they are putting their best foot forward. They don’t have anything to say about current events like sex scandals, rebellious German bishops promoting sexual perversion (along with James Martin, SJ in the US), Vatican bank scandals, hardball politics, the suppression of the Latin Mass, agitation for women’s ordination and open rebellion among some female orders, contradictions between councils and popes regarding doctrinal matters that should be consistent through the ages and not subject to change, etc. Nor is there anything about historical events like the scandals of the pornocracy, the Avignon Papacy, the corruption that led to the Reformation, or the vulgarity and scandal of various papal families and dynasties, like the Borgias. Nothing is shown from the Inquisition and the burning of heretics (and others) at the stake, or the persecution and slaughter of Lutherans and other Christians who sought reformation. There was no reenactment of the trial of Galileo or the exhumation of Pope Formosus, dressing his corpse and putting it on trial in the macabre Cadaver Synod (chopping off his fingers and tossing the body into the Tiber, where it washed up). And why would there be? This is, after all, a marketing campaign.

But notice how worship is portrayed in this video. Again, this is what they want you to see. This is their best foot forward. You see liturgy, reverence, and beauty. You see vestments and incense. You don’t see goofy Father Boomer wearing a football jersey. You don’t see the ubiquitous lady cantor in a muumuu attempting to lead the congregation by warbling “On Eagles’ Wings.” You don’t see the priest from South America or the Philippines dancing with parishioners (sometimes luridly), or the American bishop scolding people for kneeling to receive the Sacrament. You don’t see a pastor walking around giving a sermon. You don’t see screens and drums and guitars. You don’t see a stage with a preacher clad in chinos or polos or graphic tees. You see what people - especially young people - are thirsting for: authentic, beautiful, liturgical, sacramental dignity. They are putting their best foot forward: vested and walking in a dignified way in the chancel and at the altar.

No gimmicks. No CoWo. No stunts. No stages or sets. No skits, no kiddie pools, no praise band. Indeed, what you see in this Roman Catholic video is the kind of dignified worship focused on the cross of Christ that we Lutherans say that we practice in Article 24: the kind of worship that God tells us in His Word that He wants to see His people practice (Exodus 26-31).

The Roman Catholic Church knows what people are looking for. And we Lutherans have it. At least, some of us do. See the video below.

Lutherans, come home!

This was published April 19, 2010. — Ed.

The idea behind ceremonies is that they speak for themselves. Or, as our Confessions put it, their purpose is to teach the people about Christ. The way the Celebrant uses his body in the Divine Service speaks volumes. Consider the infamous Black Rubric from the Book of Common Prayer…

Continue reading…

Liturgical worship developed organically in response to the miracle of our Lord’s Presence with us in Word and Sacrament. It is no accident that every ancient pre-Reformation church tradition was, and is, liturgical. Lutherans - especially as confessed in the Book of Concord and in the historic practice of our churches - followed in continuity, since we are a continuum from the church of the apostles “in doctrine and in ceremonies” (AC Conclusion 5) retaining the liturgical order of the western Mass (AC 24:1, Ap 24:1). Along with the church that came before us, we too confess the Real Presence, and this sacramental credendi is matched by and supported by our liturgical orandi.

Likewise, the worship practices of the radical reformation are also organic, resulting from a denial of the Real Presence. Incarnational elements of worship, such as images and statues, were purged. Ceremonies that confess the Real Presence - like bowing, kneeling, the sign of the cross at certain moments, bells, even candles placed on the altar - were excised. Continuity with the past was purposefully severed. Reverence during the consecration of the elements was relaxed in harmony with their confession that this is merely a symbolic, natural ritual, rather than the miraculous manifestation of the supernatural Divine Presence.

Today, the difference between the liturgical worship of historic Christianity and the modern worship of contemporary Evangelicals (so-called) is stark. The former maintain the continuum of litugical identity, even within a diversity of specific traditions. The latter also have a unifying principle of casualness and entertainment, also within a diversity of specific traditions. But it is undeniable that there are two distinct streams within modern Christianity. And their respective orandies reflect their respective credendies.

But Lutherans have gone schizophrenic: trying to pound the square peg of “modern worship” orandi into the round hole of confessional Lutheran credendi.

And the results are predictable: confusion, offense, and disunity. Advocates of “modern worship” say that the problem is with the unloving, inflexible liturgicals who won’t just yield and accept them. Their strategy is to wear down the liturgicals through the velvet glove of endless “conversation” combined with their iron fist of leveraging their money and potential synodical power by trying to change the calculus of voting (giving themselves extra votes while seeking to disenfranchise normal-sized churches), as well as seeking to end the liturgical bent of the synod’s leadership through elections and resolutions.

We can see the two divergent approaches in these two videos.

In this first offering, Fr. David Kind, pastor of University Lutheran Chapel in Minneapolis (a liturgical congregation that the “missional” faction temporarily succeeded in literally bulldozing), gives a presentation that explains the maxim “lex orandi, lex credendi,” and why it matters in authentic Lutheran worship. Pastor Kind isn’t merely talking, but we see images of worship as he celebrates and officiates in his parish. We see the lexes in harmony with one another, complementing and feeding into each other - teaching the people “what they need to know about Christ” (AC 24:3).

In the second, we see a different approach: the latest in the quest for the historical eating the cake of Evangelical (so-called) style while retaining the cake of Lutheran substance. Fr. Steve Zank and Mr. Kip Fox are rostered faculty members of Concordia - Irvine. In this video, they use a synod resolution as a roadmap to explain their attempt at a via media between what they consider to be two extremes. They are part of the Center for Worship Leadership, and they provide alternative liturgies and soft-rock worship music that reflect their approach.

They are trying, yet again, to walk that Lueckean tightrope between Evangelical (so-called) style (orandi) and Lutheran substance (credendi).

In the current Gottesdienst print journal, Fr. Eckardt wrote a piece called “Reflections of a Recovering Praise Band Leader.” In this autobiographical article (confession?), we learn that Fritz was a piano player in a praise band at a church called Calvary Chapel (a Calvary Chapel, not the Calvary Chapel). As he was becoming Lutheran, his contemporary worship began to reflect his shifting theology. In his own words:

I crafted an entire “liturgy” for the whole congregation at Calvary to sing. I called it “The Rock Mass.” My conservative nature kept me from writing lyrics out of sheer cloth; instead I stuck to the words of the traditional liturgy I had recently learned at Calvary, which offered both “contemporary” and “traditional” forms of worship, and in those days “traditional” still meant using The Lutheran Hymnal. But that was so dry and dull, compared with the flair of the contemporary style I had learned to love. So I came up with the bright idea of setting those words to my kind of music. All the parts were there: Kyrie, Gloria, Creed, Offertory, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Nunc Dimittis. But the music was rock and roll. I presented it to the church council, and they were thrilled. Soon the Rock Mass was a favorite form of liturgy at Calvary Chapel. The kids were rocking out, having fun, grooving with the beat, and singing the very words of the liturgy. One could even say that Evangelical style and Lutheran substance were fully on display in the Rock Mass. And it was so much fun; I couldn’t wait for Sunday mornings to come, so we could perform it again. Worship was thrilling.

If you want to read the whole piece, you can download the current Gottesdienst here.

There aren’t any extant videos of Fr. Eckardt’s Rock Mass, but if you’re interested in a heavy metal attempt, there is a Finnish Lutheran priest who tours the country with his band. Of course this is the official Finnish “church” that “ordains” women, and this is the country that prosecutes and convicts faithful Christians for their biblical confession - so keep that in mind.

Here is an excerpt from a service:

And while the magic cargo-cult word “context” is often used to say that as long as the words (credendi) are orthodox, the style (orandi) doesn’t matter, I do think that here in the real world, none of our LCMS contextualizers will be using this arrangement of a hymn (arranged and performed by a Christian band) that has passed doctrinal review:

The bottom line is that we have to decide the role, if any, entertainment plays in Christian, and more specifically, authentic Lutheran, worship. Speaking of authentic Lutheran worship videos, Gottesdienst has some of our own that you can watch here. And for a mix of Divine Services and talks about Lutheran worship, you can check out this search for “Divine Service” at Flaneur Record.

By Nathan Rinne

Review and comments on the article, “Bishop John Fisher’s Response to Martin Luther”

“I am not aware of modern Catholic theologians who have attacked [John] Fisher in the way the ‘Nominalists’ have been subject to vilification. Presumably, it is Fisher’s now canonized status that protects him, in spite of the vulnerability of his statements.”
– Thomas P. Scheck

“The Scottish humanist Florentius Volusenus later told the story of a conversation at Rochester, probably around 1530, in the course of which Fisher admitted to him that he wondered what divine providence meant by making some Lutherans such fruitful commentators on Scripture despite their being heretics.”
– Richard Rex

Introduction

In these last days, as the influence of Christendom wanes and fades in the Western world, we often might breathe a sigh of relief when a relative, for example, chooses to marry any Christian, including a Roman Catholic.

I fully understand this sentiment. And yet, I nevertheless would still be quite concerned about such marriages.

When we were first married many years ago now, my lovely wife taught junior high science at a Roman Catholic school. Growing up, one of her favorite relatives was her great aunt, a devout Roman Catholic woman who also, interestingly, loved the good Lutheran hymns from The Lutheran Hymnal, “TLH”. Besides the fact that she is quite special herself, I am certain that my wife's affection for her very devout great aunt played a role in her getting that teaching job – perhaps in addition to the fact that the priest at that parish had many conservative confessional Lutheran friends!

One day while at that school, my wife heard a chapel service in which a guest preacher gave a sermon that did not mention Christ once but did tell all the students – through the use of a very memorable story – that one must "do what one can” to be saved. In her science class during the next hour, my wife shared the message of God's free grace in Jesus Christ in a very heartfelt way to students who heard her with interest. In any case, who was that seemingly renegade priest and what had just happened?! This, after all, was not the Roman Catholic Church that she had grown to respect in her life!

Up until a couple weeks ago, I had often wondered where in the world that priest came from as well! In the past 25 years or so, when I have taken the time to listen to programs like Catholic Answers or the typical Relevant Radio fare, I simply do not recall coming across people who taught like that priest.[1]

A Fascinating Yet Apparently Neglected Opponent

The mystery was recently solved for me after my wife, who still pays some attention to Roman Catholic happenings, informed me about the heroic life of Bishop John Fisher, of whom this article is about.

This will take some explaining. To start off, many contemporary intellectual Roman Catholics see Lutheranism as an unhappy result of a short-lived school of medieval thought called Nominalism. No doubt, in modern Catholicism, Nominalism is viewed as a definitional enemy of Orthodox Catholicism, which is largely based on the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Both this current piece, and the Franciscan Studies journal article it reviews and builds upon, Thomas P. Scheck's 2013 Franciscan Studies “Bishop John Fisher’s Response to Martin Luther,” challenges this common narrative in their own ways.

Both articles show that in the Middle Ages Nominalism was truly a respected and accepted ontological and theological school within Roman circles, prior to Protestant circles existing. Moreover, both those for and against the Reformation made use of the tradition. Indeed, there can be no doubt that Scheck – who is a former Associate Professor of Theology and Classics at the very conservative Ave Maria University – has produced a piece that will be of some major interest to many serious Lutherans!

Let's begin by way of some very interesting biographical background regarding Bishop John Fisher. In 1935, he, along with Sir Thomas More, was made a saint in the Roman Catholic church. The reason that this happened concurrently has to do with the fact that both men stood up to King Henry the VIII in his efforts to dispose of his current wife in favor of another. Aware of the fact that Martin Luther had faltered in allowing Philip of Hesse to take another wife, Fisher’s heroic stand had spoken to my wife, who had also learned about his writing against Luther.

After forty-one of Martin Luther's views were condemned by a Papal Bull in 1520, the reformer responded to it, and then, a short time later in early 1523, John Fisher took the time to counter each of Luther's responses in his “Confutation of Luther’s Assertion”. That work is still today only available in Latin and not in English, even as Scheck has apparently adequately summed up the work, as well as offered a recent translation of key parts of it.

What is particularly interesting about Fisher vis a vis many of Luther’s other opponents is that he was universally revered as a Franciscan man of great piety. In his Dec. 2025 First Things article about Fisher, “Make Me A Lutheran”, Richard Rex shares a number of quotes that help us to form a better picture of the man:

“Fisher’s Confutation was widely read in its time, running to about 20 editions by 1600, many of them published in the 1520s, and it left its mark on the Catholic response to what would come to be called ‘the Reformation.’ It was often cited or invoked at the Council of Trent in the middle of the century, its reputation enhanced by its author’s status as one of the first Catholic martyrs of the English Reformation….”

When it came to his opposition to Luther, with Luther’s, Rex says, “relentless and egotistical insistence on absolute assent to whatever he happened to decide was the plain meaning of Scripture” (“scriptural interpretation can never be the plain and simple thing that Luther said”!), he emphasizes Fisher’s duties and responsibilities as a bishop:

“Fisher wrote against Luther because it was his duty to do so. Everything Fisher published (as well as most of the things he wrote that remained unprinted) was the fulfillment of some very definite duty…. his sermon at the burning of Luther’s books in 1521 was presumably delivered at the command of Henry VIII or Cardinal Wolsey, or both, since they had planned the entire occasion. Fisher made clear that his Confutation of Luther’s Assertion, like all his efforts in polemical theology, was written in pursuance of his duty as a bishop to defend the souls entrusted to his care from the snares of heresy. If Erasmus’s identity was essentially authorial, Fisher’s was above all pastoral.”

Deeply concerned, he fought Luther for no other reason than the sheer duty to counter heretics:

“The progress of Lutheran and other heretical doctrines at Fisher’s beloved alma mater caused him increasing grief over the next ten years. In February 1526 he preached another sermon at Paul’s Cross, this time at the first public recantation of the newfangled dissidents in England. Most of those disavowing heretical beliefs on that occasion were German merchants from the ‘Steelyard’ (the Hanseatic trading station in London), whom Thomas More had found in possession of Lutheran books during a spot search. But with them was Dr. Robert Barnes, who had preached a sermon modeled on one of ­Luther’s at the little church of St. Edward’s, just off the market square in Cambridge, on Christmas Eve 1525. This airing of Lutheran ideas by a member of the Cambridge Divinity Faculty must have seemed to Fisher an almost personal betrayal. Publishing his sermon soon afterward, he explained: ‘My duty is after my poor power to resist these heretics, the which cease not to subvert the church of Christ.’”

Rex also says that “Fisher had never been a courtier, and he was an austere, somewhat forbidding figure, of whom it was once said, ‘not only of his equals, but even of his superiors, he was both honoured and feared.’”’ So Fisher had the respect of many of his contemporaries, including Erasmus, and what is of particular interest to us is that, again, his views appear to have been a major factor in the deliberations and final statements of the Council of Trent (Scheck: “especially [with regard to] the ecclesiastical tolerance of the [non-Augustinian] scholastic concept of meritum de congruo”)!

It is therefore intriguing that Fisher’s respectful and scholarly response to Luther was never directly responded to. Scheck quotes Erasmus at the end of his article saying to Martin Luther: “[Bishop John Fisher] is tried and true, a man of learning, dignity, and a holiness not often to be encountered; and he challenges you time after time and you do not come forth to struggle with him.”

Rome Should Celebrate the Nominalist Fisher!

Ready to do a deep dive into scholastic and reformation theology? Things will be getting a little bit harder going at this point, but I hope you might still choose to stay with me!

Rex does not associate Fisher with the Nominalist scholastics and the “via moderna” vis a vis the “via antiqua”[2], but Scheck does, and convincingly so. I am at a loss to express how significant I think that this work from Scheck on John Fisher is. Here is a taste of the main thrust of his paper:

“My thesis is that Bishop John Fisher seems to have made a productive contribution to Catholic dogma in the sixteenth century, and that his learning and Episcopal authority may even have been a factor in the Catholic Church’s tolerance of the theories concerning the working of divine grace espoused by certain streams of scholastic theology. This claim makes a difference because some modern Catholic theologians, as I shall exemplify below, have attempted to vindicate Luther to some extent, in the name of doing ecumenical theology, by accusing pre-Reformation Catholicism of doctrinal decadence. These moderns have by and large left Fisher out of the discussion and have refrained from making him the target of their accusations. I suspect that the reason for this is that his canonization in 1935 has formed a protective shield around him. And yet Fisher strongly supports the very doctrines that have been vehemently assailed as being ‘Pelagian’ and ‘Semi-Pelagian.’ Consequently, either the moderns should add St. John Fisher’s name to their catalogue of ‘decadent late-medieval Catholic theologians,’ or they should cease making accusations against the congruous merit doctrine that the Church, to my knowledge, has never censured.”

So even as he speaks about the “problematic philosophical positions of Nominalism”[3], Scheck says that the sainted Bishop Fisher was a Nominalist in the later scholastic fashion and that he certainly helped get the idea of "congruous merit” accepted in the Council of Trent. And that basically Roman Catholics need to be honest about and proud of this fact!

To repeat for emphasis, Scheck’s article is largely about how Fisher – along with, significantly, the scholastics who came before him – affirmed the doctrine of congruous merit, a topic that, interestingly enough, is not mentioned in the new Roman Catholic Catechism. So what is this apparently valid and even critical yet apparently somewhat neglected doctrine? It is “that the human being in his natural state, or the baptized Christian in the state of mortal sin, can, even without the assistance of supernatural grace, become worthy of, or merit, God’s reward, in some sense” (italics mine).

As one does what lies within, the thing merited would not be eternal life or salvation right away, but rather one becoming worthy of God's grace in some sense, grace which the sinner is then able to meritoriously cooperate with in their progress towards their salvation and the overall process of salvation (477).

This congruous merit or “merit of congruity” is “God’s loving promise to reward human effort”, and it is a mercy, not something based on the strict justice God obligates himself to fulfill. That kind of merit, called “condign merit”, is something Scheck says that all Scholastics rejected (in the sense “that man apart from a supernatural infusion of grace can obligate God to reward”).

The significance of all of this should not be lost on serious Lutherans and other Bible-believing Protestants who exult in the doctrine of justification by grace through faith. Over and against 20th century Thomist objections about the “decadent influence of a Nominalism” that supposedly was most responsible for causing the Reformation disaster, all of this from Scheck, given that it is accurate, itself essentially validates the traditional Lutheran critique and the necessary reformation of the church.

Again, the case is only further strengthened when we read from Scheck that “the positions that John Fisher will adopt and defend against Luther’s assertions will eventually become the official doctrine of the Catholic Church.”

Truths, Long Hidden, Coming to Light?!

Evidently, even many well informed and educated contemporary (yet traditionally-minded) Roman Catholics who are mostly familiar with the content of the new catechism simply do not know what they are missing!

And Scheck’s article makes or establishes a number of claims that this Lutheran as well, somewhat familiar with the teachings of the Catholic church, found to be quite illuminating. Items from his article – in addition to things found in other sources that help us to better understand what he writes – follow:

• ”To my knowledge the term ‘Semi-Pelagian’ was first coined in a Christian creedal statement in the Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577/80).”

• That very term was later used by Thomist or Dominican theologians against the Jesuit Luis de Molina, who had attempted to create a synthesis between the doctrine of election and free-will (see more on this specifically in a recent blog post that I did on the topic).

• Even as some Roman Catholics like Harry J. McSorley follow Heiko Oberman and say men like Erasmus and Gabriel Biel were “Neo-semi-Pelagians”, Scheck vigorously denies this.

• The Nominalists are certainly not Pelagians, for they “have no separation of divine grace from human free will.” “The Pelagian claim is that the sinner can earn grace without divine aid; in other words, that the sinner’s actions are sufficient for grace” (Cross).

• So, according to Scheck, these are not Pelagians because the “human activity which counts as disposition towards justification must be regarded as presupposing the context of grace.”[4]

• For instance, Bonaventure says that the gratia gratis data (gratuitously given grace) “is always at hand to rouse it [free will], and with its aid the will can exert itself to the full.” This would go hand-in-hand with “actual grace”, a theological term that originated only after the Council of Trent (495, 496).

• Here, evidently, the merit of Christ, the merit accomplished by Christ, would also be said to be in the background, assumed. Even if in practice, explicit mention of, or gesturing toward, Christ and his work need not necessarily always accompany grace.

• Again, no scholastic theologian was really a Pelagian because there is no “inner connection” between nature and grace. In other words, doing the right things does not, strictly speaking (i.e., according to strict justice), earn grace as a necessary reward that God obligates himself to fulfill.

• So, perhaps, strictly speaking — very technically speaking — it might appear that no one “deserves mercy”, or grace. At the same time, Scheck nevertheless quotes Fisher talking about how the sinner “can do many good works with the help of [] grace” whereby he can “earn pardon” (499)!

• Thomists these days might say God’s gift of redemption/eternal life can only be received or accepted in faith via an act of freewill – but not earned (Malloy) ; also, Pope Benedict in fact went so far to say we can't merit heaven![5]

• Still, again, Trent remains. And “perhaps [Fisher’s] Episcopal authority contributed to the tolerance of these scholastic concepts which seem to owe very little to Augustine’s late anti-Pelagian theology.”

• Fisher also used a quote from a man who was thought to be Augustine, the late 5th century church historian Gennadius of Marseilles, to support “freedom of the human will and… synergism or human collaboration in the process of salvation”, meaning initial justification or regeneration. Men like Lombard, Bonaventure, Scotus, Aquinas, and John Eck also used this same quote, and also attributed it to Augustine.

• The Roman Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong says that Pelagianism is basically “salvation by works” and semi-Pelagianism means “[being] saved partially by our own self-generated works” (italics mine), whereas, in truth, the very choosing to seek God “is always caused by God”.[6]

• Given what we have learned about “gratuitously given grace” or “the context of grace” above, Armstrong's sentiment is understandable. That said, when congruous merit essentially admits to self-generated works or works done by nature, the label “semi-Pelagianism” seems apt.

• Again, congruous merit is “that the human being in his natural state, or the baptized Christian in the state of mortal sin, can, even without the assistance of supernatural grace, become worthy of, or merit, God’s reward, in some sense” (italics mine).

• ”[The Thomist Francis] Clark remarks that if Pelagianism is defined to mean the free cooperation of the human will with grace, then not only Biel’s theology, but all Catholic theology is Pelagian.”

• So all parties in Rome will agree – following the teachings of the Council of Trent itself – that it is really possible for even unregenerate men – even if only on account of the graces that God bestows – to love God, truly keep and obey his commandments.

• Still, ”Monti says that although this was often presented in a way that suggested that by ‘doing what lies within one’s power,’ a person could put God under obligation to reward him or her, the theologians of the early Franciscan School at Paris refined the meaning of this maxim, stressing that sinful human beings can in no way force God to act” (italics mine).

Regardless of that last comment, Luther's comments in Section 3 of the 1537 Smalcald Articles, official confessional documents of the Lutheran church, nevertheless still seem highly relevant here:

“It was impossible that [Rome] should teach correctly concerning repentance, since they did not [rightly] know the real sins [the real sin]. For, as has been shown above, they do not believe aright concerning original sin, but say that the natural powers of man have remained [entirely] unimpaired and incorrupt; that reason can teach aright, and the will can in accordance therewith do aright [perform those things which are taught]; that God certainly bestows His grace when a man does as much as is in him, according to his free will.”

So, to review, Scheck points out that “some of the so-called ‘Nominalist’ doctrines that have been accused of being Pelagian or semi-Pelagian are ones shared by classical scholastics such as Scotus, Aquinas and Bonaventure. Moreover these views are defended as orthodox by Fisher.” All of these men and more, for example, taught the merit of congruity, and not only as something for those in a state of grace. In particular Fisher, as a Nominalist, developed the notion of the “merit of congruity” in the same Pelagian/"semi-Pelagian” direction as others. He had a massive influence on the Council of Trent, where the Augustinian currents in the church were arguably suppressed[7], and therefore much of Rome appears to be in denial today about what it truly was and is. They seem to no longer remember, for example, the claim of John Eck in 1530 that “the monks try to pattern their lives more closely after the Gospel in order to merit eternal life” (Roman Confutation to the Augsburg Confession).

Accompanying All of This is Confusion about Luther

At this point, taking into consideration what we have learned from Scheck, we should also address his misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Martin Luther.

First of all, Scheck raises some reasonable questions and concerns about Luther’s exegesis of 1 Tim. 2:4, as well as his condemned comments about “absolute necessity” and sinful man's [non-existent] free will.[8] That said, at the same time, he goes on to wrongly attribute inconsistency to Luther simply because Luther also teaches that the new creature in Christ has freedom when his will is united to God's by faith.

This could have been avoided by addressing the wider context of the incredibly well-known debate that followed between Luther and Erasmus just a couple years later — not to mention by noting that the Lutheran Confessions, which are binding on true Lutheran pastors, extol and recommend Luther’s Bondage of the Will even as they also address and answer other important questions about the true scriptural teaching regarding predestination.

Second, it seems that Scheck misleads the reader in his paper in other ways as well, inadvertently if not significantly so. He says that Luther “stands in tension with the scholastics” and likely exaggerates the views of others when in his early Commentary on the Psalms (1515), he says that “God gives his grace ‘without fail’ to the man who does what is in him.”[9] Rather than citing Cross who says of Scotus that “the scholastic doctrine did not place God under any such obligation”, Scheck would do well to first of all recognize that Luther was mainly interacting with, and, at that time supporting, the very prominent and more contemporary Franciscan Gabriel Biel.

And was Luther interpreting Biel here fairly? (481-482). Here, it is helpful to look at Scheck favorably quoting Clark on Biel:

“He did not allege that such naturally good actions had in themselves any salutary power or merit which could establish a claim in justice, either to eternal life or to the granting of the grace of conversion. What he did hold, and it is something essentially different, is that God, from pure liberality and not from any obligation in justice, chooses to bestow grace on those who by their natural powers ‘do what in them lies’” (italics mine).

In the entire 1515 Luther quote Scheck provides, Luther indeed talks about how God made himself our debtor. Nevertheless though, rather than insisting that Luther means that God was obligated to reward men according to their works, the context of the quote makes clear that when Luther says that “God gives his grace without fail” he is expressing the way God comforts his people out of the mercy he has promised and attaches to these “do-your-best-works”. As was so often the case during his career, Luther’s first instinct, knowing his own struggles, was to be pastoral, and so he uses debt in a more metaphorical sense here to strongly make his point, attempting to bring the struggling Christian comfort.

Also, it is important to recall from earlier in the paper that Scheck also says that for all the scholastics the merit of congruity is “God’s loving promise to reward human effort”. So God promises to give grace, and Luther was not only rightly addressing men like Biel, but Scotus. For when it came to the matter of congruous merit there was no appreciable difference between the men!

Third, can Reformation theology be dismissed as Martin Luther's aberrant “scrupulosity”, OCD, or other psychological issues?[10] Even though Scheck does not make this exact claim, this belief is almost ubiquitous among contemporary Roman Catholic apologists (I think that these are the only plausible things they can cling to, given Luther's integrity), and so it is more than likely that it is in the background of his thinking (and see the footnote above).

When one takes into consideration both the above and the fact that even the apparently more tenacious Augustinians in Rome today say one might be freely committed to Christ, even have a divine faith, but also not have a true or living faith (Malloy), this accusation against Lutherans seems to be more coping than truth. It would appear that any person who is being particularly honest about both what the Bible and the Roman Catholic Church teach might have thoughts and feelings like those Luther had, even today. Even today, many of the particularly devout fear the fires of purgatory, for instance (see Patrick Madrid show, Jan.6, hr 1).

Finally, It is also interesting that Fisher's response to Luther does not mention that what he is doing – saying that fear of God's punishment instead of love for God is salutary and readies one for grace – no Scholastic theologians at that time were addressing, a fact Scheck makes clear without drawing attention to it![11] Of course, Martin Luther was talking about this kind of thing all the time, but not in the context of free will and human works, but in the context of God's working repentance in man.

So what does this all mean?

Just as prior to the Reformation very few theologians were actually talking about faith in a biblical and practical way, there were also no contemporary theologians of prominence during Luther's time that were talking about how it was good, right, and salutary that a person would tremble and be fearful of God’s punishment because of their lack of faith and righteousness!

Blessed Clarity, that we Might Know Who Has God’s Approval!

Why didn't Luther or Melanchthon respond to Fisher, who they considered a Pelagian? Luther, after all, famously did battle with the more popular Erasmus. Scheck indirectly answers the question when he says that “there is a profound congruence between Erasmus’s and Fisher’s assessments of Luther’s errors and between Erasmus’s and Fisher’s theological positions generally…[From Fisher] Erasmus found supporting arguments for his own Catholic position.”[12]

It is to be expected that Roman Catholics will find errors with Lutherans. And vice versa. So, for our own part, we must say that this is definitely some seriously wrong stuff that Rome still tolerates today (albeit not so openly and loudly)! So what Martin Luther wrote in his Large Catechism, explaining the Third Article of the Apostles Creed, comes to mind, as he displays the decisive clarity that we need:

“For where He does not cause it to be preached and made alive in the heart, so that it is understood, [God’s word] is lost, as was the case under the Papacy, where faith was entirely put under the bench, and no one recognized Christ as his Lord or the Holy Ghost as his Sanctifier, that is, no one believed that Christ is our Lord in the sense that He has acquired this treasure for us, without our works and merit, and made us acceptable to the Father. What, then, was lacking?

This, that the Holy Ghost was not there to reveal it and cause it to be preached; but men and evil spirits were there, who taught us to obtain grace and be saved by our works.

Therefore it is not a Christian Church either; for where Christ is not preached, there is no Holy Ghost who creates, calls, and gathers the Christian Church, without which no one can come to Christ the Lord.”

When then-Pope Benedict XVI said in Nov. 2008, that “Luther’s expression sola fide is true if faith is not opposed to charity, to love”, serious Lutherans took real notice. But unless Augustinian emphases arise strongly in Rome again, here we will certainly never be dealing with the simple “differences of expression, emphasis, and insight” that men like Christopher Malloy suggest exist.

And so here things stand with Thomas P. Scheck, in spite of the good and honest work that he has done! After all, he seems at pains to emphasize that Rome “stresses the responsibility of the human being to respond to God’s general offer of grace by taking up the offer and manifesting one’s seriousness by getting on the path to conversion.” After all, he asks, would not “an all-good God…. surely recognize [one’s] best efforts as providing an appropriate basis for the divine self-gift of justifying grace”?

I can only conclude that a “Great Divorce” on God’s part that would actually be justice… wholly justified… against all the vain works of man, does not seem to occur to many today, even among those who even most vigorously claim Jesus Christ as their own….

So, we can see more clearly now, can we not? This was indeed the “good word” early 16th century Rome had for those fighting despair of God’s grace! And as we see from that 1515 quote from Luther mentioned above, this is evidently somewhat similar to what Luther himself taught at that time! Again, Pope Benedict – quite familiar with Luther's writings – was not jesting when he said that Luther at this time was indeed being a good Roman Catholic!

Evidently until he wasn't, as that was not sufficient. So, then as now, serious students of Scripture, especially recalling Luther’s and Erasmus’s Bondage of the Will debate, will respond by saying that as “pastoral” as all of this seeks to be on Rome’s part, it in the end amounts to only idle, futile, and even harmful speculation. 

So, for example, when the popular Roman Catholic apologist Patrick Madrid, somewhat understandably, tells his caller that God will provide even those who have not heard the gospel a chance to repent, to cooperate, he is asserting things he has no business asserting (The Patrick Madrid Show: January 28, 2026, Hour 2, Relevant Radio, 1:00 minute mark). No. As much as one may desire that all men be saved. 

Against those who emphasize free will, we will side with those who say such are tampering with the mystery of God’s predestinating grace here – not fully respecting it and in fact trying to rationalize (“rational lies”) it! For man is by nature a child of wrath (Eph. 2:3)! And as the prophet Jeremiah said, “The heart is deceitful above all things. Who can understand it?” (17:9).

Yes, by God's goodness, some men are certainly looking for salvation from their sin, death, and the devil and need grace, need that word: They need to hear the gospel, hear of the free forgiveness, life, and salvation found in Jesus Christ!

At the same time, Christ calls all to repent, and no man is really interested in grace until he truly sees and feels his need. And, even once that need is felt, all of fallen man’s subsequent moral efforts to obtain grace will end up eventually expecting God to find one worthy of adoption as sons (see CCC 1266, 1999, 2000, and 2010; Compendium of the Catechism 263 and 423), reciprocating in response to one's own goodness. 

Alternatively, they will move towards accusing God of being evil and unjust in this or that fashion! Or, perhaps, simply just unreasonable and “improper” when it comes to the business of governing both heaven and earth! This, to be sure, does not lead to peace with God.

Concluding Thoughts

The opinio legis, or “opinion of the law”, is the belief, held in common by sinful man[13], that being good merits not only blessing but salvation, blessing in the life to come.

In other words, all our good outweighs all our evil and hence we merit his favor, or more piously, His mercy. The worthy obtain mercy! Might one be forgiven – particularly in light of Lumen Gentium which gives hope to even “good” atheists – for concluding that Roman Catholic theology has simply been systematizing and formalizing the opinio legis into its theology for a long time?

Commenting on one of Luther’s favorite passages, Jesus’s statement that “your faith has saved you” (Luke 7:50), John Fisher wrote in a 1526 sermon:

“Our Saviour saith, not only Fides, but Fides tua. Thy faith (a truth it is) is the gift of God. But it is not made my faith, nor thy faith, nor his faith, as I said before, but by our assent. …But our assent is plainly our work. Wherefore at the least one work of ours joineth with faith to our justifying.”

Alternatively, for Luther, all of this was an existential matter of the utmost importance – something that Fisher seemed to realize in his own concern that fear and terror of God be thought to be salutary. In his 1537 Antinomian Disputations, Luther in fact went so far to speak of how where “this poor and damned nature seizes Christ the Propitiator and Mediator by faith, there sin itself, which is still in the flesh, not only is not condemned, not considered as sin, but is also forgiven for Christ’s sake and is like nothing.”[14] One might look at a statement like this from Luther and say that God has created this cooperation that pursues the good (which is in fact true), but at the same time, in a debate like this one even putting the focus there is kind of beside the point, and in fact rather misses it.

In sum, the person who would live by law will not actually follow God's law – even if they are inclined to think they do – and even the amazingly good news of the gift of God’s grace becomes something to basically be contained and regulated. Essentially, something to just be “baked into” the framework of our doing good things for God that we might merit His salvation!

The problem of basically using one's neighbor as a means to secure temporal and eternal blessings for oneself is not the only problem. Scheck appears to be willing to face up to and admit what few men today in Rome will, though by way of contrast, he at least – given his rhetorical questions! – evidently does not see the following viewpoint as a problem at all: If God were not to compensate us in some way, He would actually, in some sense, be committing an offense by violating that which is “fitting”. He would, in some sense, be unfairly discriminating against us!

No. And this is exactly the reason there is the need for real conversion, for the turn from darkness to light in Christ. For knowledge of the real law, the real judgment, and the real grace, that is the promise of Christ. If one doubts that this kind of clarity is actually true of Luther's teaching, they need only look at the final section in his Large Catechism, the conclusion to the Ten Commandments.

As the church fathers and Augustine taught, freedom is simply “the ability to choose what we want.” But as Woody Allen says: “The heart wants what it wants”. Our fallen will, wanting what it wants, is precisely the problem! So of course God is the one, in our Savior Jesus Christ, who makes us want to trust in him and love him. For he is the Good One who died for us and was raised from the dead to save our soul! If God’s grace and our “freedom” with its “meritorious works” are combined, our justification before God is always uncertain, for it always, in part, lies with us.[15]

But that is out of our hands. The Bible says that through the blood of Christ and his righteousness we can indeed rest in peace before him – unless our love of sin simply causes us to shut him out.

To this author, it seems inevitable that Luther must become a saint in the Roman Catholic church if it is to remain a true church. At the very least, pray for a revival of biblical teaching in Rome, a recovery not just of any scholastic, but the great St. Augustine himself!

FIN

[1] As such, I confess that I have at times admonished Christians not to assume that every Roman Catholic that they meet is trying to earn their salvation by works, but that their Church these days also emphasizes the mercy of God in Christ crucified. There are, for example, Roman Catholics who are still partial to Augustine. Still.

[2] “To a scholar such as ­Fisher, who had imbibed at Cambridge the theological traditions of the via antiqua—the ‘old way’ of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus—Luther’s cavalier dismissal of most of the sacraments, together with his via moderna (‘new way’) emphasis on the sheer will—one might almost say the sheer ­willfulness—of God, was always likely to be rebarbative. On the subject of scholastic theology, by the way, Scheck advances in this book, as he has done elsewhere, a case for seeing Fisher as a Scotist. It remains my own view that Fisher was more an eclectic than a disciple of any specific figure, but that nonetheless he had a particular predilection for Thomas Aquinas, whom he more than once acclaimed as ‘the flower of theologians.’ Yet whatever might be thought of his precise theological affiliation, his theological center of gravity lay firmly within the ‘realism’ of the High Middle Ages rather than the ‘Nominalism’ of the Later Middle Ages.”

[3] “Without wishing to deny that Ockham’s teaching may pose serious philosophical problems from the Thomistic and other perspectives, I wish only to indicate that he seems to have been a victim of unfair vilification in some modern circles. Certainly John Fisher, the subject of this article, admired Ockham and praised him highly, which should at the least give pause to Ockham’s more immoderate modern accusers” (italics mine).

A key quote from Ockham would be the following: “For no act [elicited] by natural [causes] or by any created cause whatever can be meritorious. Rather [merit comes only] from the grace of God voluntarily and freely accepting [some act].” (Ockham, Sent. Lib. 1, D. 17.2)

[4] Scheck knows Pelagius well, as he is the author of Thomas P. Scheck, “Pelagius’s Interpretation of Romans,” in A Companion to St. Paul in the Middle Ages, ed. Steven R. Cartwright (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 79-113.

[5] “Finally, Benedict underscores ‘the insignificance of our actions and of our deeds to achieve salvation’ (Nov. 26). Elsewhere, he states, ‘We cannot—to use the classical expression—”merit” Heaven through our works’ (Spe Salvi, 35). If we turn to Trent, we hear,

‘If anyone says that the good works of the justified man are gifts of God in such a way that they are not also the good merits of the justified himself, or that the justified person, by the good works he performs through the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ (whose living member he is), does not truly merit an increase in grace, eternal life, the attainment of eternal life itself (if he dies in grace), and even an increase in glory, let him be anathema.’ (Trent, VI, canon 32)

It is of first importance to stress the continuity of the faith. As Paul VI indicated and as Pope Benedict XVI indicates, the Second Vatican Council, as all post-conciliar teaching, must be read according to a hermeneutic of continuity. That hermeneutic demands as its bedrock a solid knowledge of Tradition and as its lifeblood a suppleness grounded in attention to the real, to what the rule of faith tells us.”

Later Malloy insists: "This Redemption is radical. Such a gift can only be received; it cannot be earned, though its acceptance through faith is an act of freewill."

[6] Armstrong sees no contradiction in saying this and also talking about how our free will, with grace, chooses God: one “choose[s] in the same way they choose to sin or not sin at any given moment.”

In the New Advent dictionary available for free online it says this about semi-Pelagianism:

“Thus, from being half friendly, the Massilians developed into determined opponents of Augustine. Testimony as to this change of feeling is supplied by two non-partisan laymen, Prosper of Aquitaine and a certain Hilarius, both of whom in their enthusiasm for the newly-blossoming monastic life voluntarily shared in the daily duties of the monks. In two distinct writings (St. Augustine, Epp. ccxxv-xxvi in P.L., XXXIII, 1002-12) they gave Augustine a strictly matter-of-fact report of the theological views of the Massilians. They sketched in the main the following picture, which we complete from other sources:

-In distinguishing between the beginning of faith (initium fidei) and the increase of faith (augmentum fidei), one may refer the former to the power of the free will, while the faith itself and its increase is absolutely dependent upon God;

-the gratuity of grace is to be maintained against Pelagius in so far as every strictly natural merit is excluded; this, however, does not prevent nature and its works from having a certain claim to grace;

-as regards final perseverance in particular, it must not be regarded as a special gift of grace, since the justified man may of his own strength persevere to the end;

….the[se] three…. propositions contain the whole essence of Semipelagianism.”

[7] Regarding Augustine’s views on original sin and concupiscence, note what Jesse Couenhoven, writing in a Roman Catholic publication (Journal of Augustinian Studies) from a Roman Catholic institution (Villanova), says:

“In his (396) essay To Simplician Augustine defines sin as ‘perversity and lack of order, that is, a turning away from the Creator who is more excellent, and a turning to the creatures which are inferior to him’ (I.2.18). Later in his life, he gives a corresponding definition of virtue as ‘rightly ordered love’ (Civ.Dei XV.22) and writes that ‘it must be a sin to desire what the law of God forbids’ (Civ.Dei XIV.10.). These statements fit perfectly with Augustine’s claim in The Perfection of Human Righteousness: ‘But there is sin either where there is not the love that ought to exist or where it is less than it ought to be, whether or not this can be avoided by the will’ (6.15). This states a principle from which Augustine never deviates—indeed, it is central to his thinking….Carnal concupiscence is desire for things forbidden, and thus, the desire for sin (C.Jul.imp. IV.69). Put otherwise, it is the law of sin (Pecc.Mer. II.4.4), or “disobedience coming from ourselves and against ourselves” (nupt.et conc. II.9.22), and as such the sin that is the penalty of sin mentioned above. Thus, carnal concupiscence is disordered desire…

[Augustine] mention[s] that some claim that the sin that resides in our flesh is not really sin, but only leads to sin insofar as one consents to it. To speak that way, he notes, is to think of concupiscence as sin in an unusual and ill-defined sense (Perf.Just. 21.44; cp. Rist 1994, 136). “Such persons draw these subtle distinctions,” he writes – not admiringly – but he goes on to grant the point for the sake of argument; he then suggests that people sin because they naturally consent to the desires of “this same sin . . . evil concupiscence” (ibid.). One might contend that his willingness to direct his argument away from the mere presence of carnal concupiscence to consent to it indicates that Augustine has begun to consider carnal concupiscence not sin, but temptation, a penalty of the fall. Yet he obstinately calls it sin, even while pressing his argument that all sin on his subtle opponent’s own ground, by arguing that we naturally and inevitably consent to evil desire” (italics mine)

[8] Even as God at times chooses to give men over to their sin, Luther certainly did not believe that God is the moral cause of unbelievers sinning and going to hell – even as some took Luther's words about absolute necessity this way, even after the clarifications he made in the Bondage of the Will and later as well, particularly in his Genesis commentary See the Solid Declaration, Article 2, Formula of Concord, 44:

“Even so Dr. Luther wrote of this matter also in his book De Servo Arbitrio, i. e., Of the Captive Will of Man, in opposition to Erasmus, and elucidated and supported this position well and thoroughly, and afterward he repeated and explained it in his glorious exposition of the book of Genesis, especially of Gen. 26. There likewise his meaning and understanding of some other peculiar disputations introduced incidentally by Erasmus, as of absolute necessity, etc., have been secured by him in the best and most careful way against all misunderstanding and perversion; to which we also hereby appeal and refer others.”

Lutherans will maintain that their understanding of predestination, which is focused on grace and not on the faith of the believer, is in line with that of Saint Augustine who said, “Predestination is the foreknowledge and preparedness on God’s part to bestow the favors by which all those are saved who are to be saved.”

Robert Kolb, in his 2005 book, Bound Choice, Election, and Wittenberg Theological Method makes matters more clear in his introductory chapter: “This study presumes that [Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon] and their disciples struggled to make clear that God, as the creator of all that is and the moving agent of all that happens, exercises total responsibility for everything in his creation, while at the same time they insisted that God has given every human being responsibility for obedience in his or her own sphere of life” (10).

The same year Luther defended his view of absolute necessity in 1521 his colleague Philip Melanchthon said in the first edition of his Loci Communes—highly praised by Luther—that “since everything that comes about happens necessarily according to divine predestination, our will has no freedom.” (Philipp Melanchthon, Commonplaces: Loci Communes 1521, Translated by Christian Preus, [St. Louis, Miss: Concordia Publishing House, 2014]), 29.

In a footnote in his recent English translation of Melanchton’s 1521 Loci, Christian Preus states (on page 31):

"John Eck (1486-1543) was a German Scholastic theologian who championed the cause of Rome against Luther and Melanchthon. In his work Chrysopassus (1514), he had condemned Valla’s position on the bondage of the will and insinuated that Valla was not competent to write on such a topic. Erasmus, in his Diatribe on Free Will (1524), also dismisses Valla: 'Larurentius Valla’s authority does not hold much weight among theologians' (AS 4:24)."

Therefore, whatever Valla’s influence, not every theologian of the time was captive to his ideas. For an argument that Luther and Melanchthon had basically gotten caught up in Valla’s wake, see Kraal’s 2015 article “Valla-Style Determinism and the Intellectual Background of Luther’s De servo arbitrio,” (Harvard Theological Review. 108, no. 3: 402-422). Kraal argues that some of the most important features in Luther’s arguments for absolute necessity find their real genesis in Valla’s De libero arbitrio of 1439.

The author recommends this work with a grain of salt, as it seems Kraal makes a glaring error in stating that Melanchthon states, “boldly and triumphantly, that ‘Valla…refuted the position of the Schools on free will’” (416). As best as I can tell, this is not at all what Melanchthon says in his text.

[9] The full quote from Luther is this: "He does not say ‘as we have merited,’ but ‘as Thou hast sworn.’ Hence the fact that God made Himself our debtor is because of the promise of Him who is merciful, not because of the worth of meritorious human nature. He required nothing but preparation, that we might be capable of this gift, as if a prince or king of the earth would promise his robber or murderer one hundred florins, prepared only to wait for him at the determined time and place. Here it is clear that that king would be a debtor out of his free promise and mercy without the robber’s merit, nor would the king deny what he had promised, because of demerit. So also the spiritual advent is by grace and will be by glory, because it is not on the basis of our merits but of the pure promise of a merciful God. Thus he promised for the spiritual advent: ‘Ask, and you will receive, seek, and you will find, knock and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives, etc.’ (Matt 7:7-8). Hence the teachers correctly say that to a man who does what is in him God gives grace without fail, and though he could not prepare himself for grace on the basis of worth (de condigno), because the grace is beyond compare, yet he may well prepare himself on the basis of fitness (de congruo) because of this promise of God and the covenant of his mercy." (LW 11, 396 (WA 4, 262, italics mine).

[10] Or self-righteous authoritarian tendencies? Scheck: “One of his favorite texts, according to Rex, became ‘Omnis homo mendax’ (‘Every man is a liar’ Ps 115:11), a maxim he applied rigorously to all human authors and authorities except himself.” 

[11] “According to Heynck, Fisher goes beyond both Duns Scotus and Gabriel Biel in his positive assessment of the remorse that arises from fear. Whereas they (Scotus and Biel) did not want to recognize it as authentic and true, a predication that applied only to contrition, not attrition, Fisher is more positive and stresses that a detestation of sin that arises from the motive of fear of punishment is a true and sincere remorse. On the other hand, Heynck concludes that it is legitimate to characterize Fisher’s doctrine of remorse as  ‘Scotist.’” (497, italics mine)

[12] The free will, he said in this famous debate, is “the ability of the human will according to which man is able either to turn himself to what leads to eternal salvation, or to turn away from it.” More: “They say that man cannot will anything good without special grace,… cannot complete anything without… the constant help of divine grace. This opinion seems to be pretty probable, because it leaves to man a striving and an effort, and yet does not admit that he is to ascribe even the least to his own powers.”

[13] See the 20th century Lutheran dogmatician Francis Pieper on the only two kinds of religion: https://podcasts.apple.com/si/podcast/the-essence-of-christianity-franz-pieper/id1852167931?i=1000746045685 

[14] Sonntag edition, 2008, Lutheran Press. 3rd disputation.

[15] In a debate with the online Roman Catholic apologist and Molinist Dave Armstrong, one JS stated:

“The solution of St. Thomas and St. Augustine halts at this [Rom. 11:33] mystery and respects it fully as there is no attempt to tamper with it. And this ‘halting’ of the intellect before the brightness of this mystery is no less of a ‘cop out’ than St. Paul’s admission of the ‘incomprehensibility’ of the wisdom and knowledge of God. While Molinism is not heretical, it does not fully respect the mystery; it seeks to penetrate and ‘rationalize’ it via middle knowledge and foreseen merits, so that it appears more respectable and ‘humane.’ I candidly disagree with this approach, and find it to be vain” (italics mine).

All this said, the position of the Thomist also may well lead to despair. In his debate with Dave Armstrong, JS went on to put matters this way:

“If God granted efficacious grace (specifically that of final perseverance) to everyone, then everyone would be saved, since efficacious grace moves man’s will to perform meritorious works and fulfill the commandments. Yet not everyone is saved. Therefore, not everyone is given these graces. Why does God give some men the grace of final perseverance? We don’t always know, other than the fact that God loves them more so as to impart those graces. Why does God allow final impenitence? Essentially, as a punishment for previous demerits. Why does God allow a just man to fall into sin? Essentially, for a greater good for that person and for the whole of God’s plan, which is not completely realized in this life (italics mine).

More: “As the Council of Trent admonished, we ought to entrust ourselves to the providence of God, to the sacraments, and to perseverance in good works, since the sovereignty of God is absolute (not conditioned) and He will show mercy on whomever he wishes to show mercy.”

No one can be absolutely certain of his or her salvation (except via private revelation) in this life; so we must hope for that which we do not as yet possess, and remain obedient to the will of God. Yet who will call God to account for why some fall away and others persevere? We must also remember the distinction between the primary cause of obedience, which is God’s grace working through us and with us, and the secondary cause of grace, which is our free will manifesting God’s grace through cooperation” (italics mine).

It is easy to see how the focus here is on one's own works, and not the freely given grace of Jesus Christ which gives certainty of eternal life upon its delivery. Therefore, Rome's position regarding Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and even outright “atheists of goodwill” today comes as no surprise.

The excerpt below is from Luther’s 1531 Galatians commentary.

We do not seek the favor of men by our doctrine, for we teach that all men are ungodly by nature and are children of wrath. We condemn the free will of man, his strength, wisdom, righteousness, and all religion of man’s own devising (religionem voluntariam). In short, we say that there is nothing whatever in us that serves to merit grace and the remission of sins. But we preach that we obtain this grace only and merely by the mercy of God for Christ’s sake….This surely is not preaching to please men and the world; for nothing can more deeply and bitterly irritate the world than then condemnation of its wisdom, righteousness, religion, and power….So we, with Paul, most confidently and certainly pronounce accursed all doctrine that does not agree with ours; for by our preaching we are seeking neither the applause of men nor the favor of princes and bishops but the favor of God alone. His grace and gift alone we preach, despising and condemning, whatever is of ourselves.

For what it is worth, even though my granddaughters complain, I will still be soaking my lawn in chemicals to combat the pests.

This was published April 29, 2021. — Ed.

In a discussion about praying to the dead, a Roman Catholic FB friend was critical of a Protestant FB friend. They went back and forth while I scooped popcorn into my mouth and enjoyed the show. Full contact theology is way more entertaining than MMA fights that inevitably become grappling on the floor, and you don’t have to pay for cable. Real theological debate is more lively, like the old Big Time Wrestling that my cousins and I used to watch on Saturday mornings.

Continue reading…

This article was published in the Easter 2016 issue of Gottesdienst.

Unsurprisingly, my previous column (“The Results Are In”, Christmas 2025) has generated some pushback. My broadside against Christ Greenfield has found its mark; in particular, my demonstration that their “contemporary” style of worship is indeed incompatible with genuine Lutheran substance. Their defense doubles down on their conception of the “priesthood of all believers” and their corresponding insistence that “ministry” is something for all Christians to do.

A recent “Lead Time” podcast was aptly named “Priesthood of All Believers: The Debate that Still Shapes the LCMS.”[1]. “Lead Time” is produced by Unite Leadership Collective, an organization headed by Christ Greenfield’s pastor, Rev. Tim Ahlman, and Mr. Jack Kalleberg, who is listed as the “Executive Director” at Christ Greenfield.

In this episode they interview Rev. Dr. Robert Scudieri, who for half a century has been a leading voice for the “missional” wing of the Missouri Synod, in collaboration with other like-minded synodical leaders, including Leroy Biesenthal, who in the 1970s was promoting “Dialog Evangelism,” the Missouri Synod’s version of the [in]famous “Kennedy Evangelism” program that swept across the fundamentalist American Evangelical regions as a result of his blockbuster book “Evangelism Explosion.”[2] In the ensuing years, emphasis on evangelism took hold of the Synod in spades, under the leadership of President Ralph Bohlmann and Dr. Ed Westcott, the Mission Executive for the LCMS Board for Missions. Professor Eugene Bunkowski was also deeply involved, and he and Scudieri began the Lutheran Society for Missiology in 1992. Anyone familiar with the strife that engulfed the Fort Wayne seminary in the 90s will recognize these names, aware that this “missional” faction of the Synod, as it happens, was also intent on removing the “confessional” emphasis there, which was under the leadership of Dr. Robert Preus. Bohlmann removed Preus from the presidency of the seminary, immediately following the notorious Wichita Convention in 1989, at which the Synod essentially amended the Augsburg Confession to allow laymen to preach and administer the Sacrament. Bohlmann’s victory proved Pyrrhic because he was himself ousted, and Preus reinstated, at the next convention (Pittsburgh 1992). But the “missional” forces reemerged when Gerald Kieschnick was elected Synodical President in 2001, and the “evangelism” push continued to drive synodical politics until he was defeated in 2010 by Matthew Harrison, who is currently in office. Under Harrison’s leadership, the Synod in 2016 (the Milwaukee Convention) reversed the Synod’s blot on the Augsburg Confession by resolving that all "Licensed Lay Deacons" must transition into either the ordained ministry or cease their performance of pastoral duties.[3] At the Synod’s most recent convention (2023, also in Milwaukee), this was reaffirmed as the delegates resolved to reaffirm AC XIV, which unequivocally states that no one should publicly teach in the Church or administer the Sacraments without a “rightful call” (rite vocatus).[4]

So the “confessional” vs. “missional” battle has raged on for decades. True confessional Lutheranism has always been serious about missions, but equally serious about how missionary activity is watered down when false notions about the ministry are bandied about. Hence, “missional” needs to be in quotes because technically it’s a bit of a misnomer; the irony is that when their errors gain headway, the Gospel in its purity is diminished and true missions end up suffering.

Lately the confessional side has been making great headway. In recent years, the St. Louis seminary has undergone significant changes toward the elimination of “missional” excesses, beginning with Harrison’s appointment of Dr. Daniel Preus as interim president in 2020. In the following year, Dr. Jon Vieker joined the faculty and became dean of the chapel, leading toward some sorely-needed reforms of the chapel, and in the same year Dr. Thomas Egger became seminary president. These changes have undoubtedly been frustrating to the “missional” side, whose influence has been greatly diminished there.

Small wonder, then, that this new Unite Leadership Collective has popped up in recent years and began to clamor for alternate routes to ordination, now that both of the Synod’s seminaries have managed to steer away from  the “missional” emphases that are odious to true confessional Lutheranism. The “missional” wing had to find another outlet for its efforts, and we have to play whack-a-mole with it.

In this episode of “Lead Time,” their rebuttal of my claims now includes a bold insistence on the removal of the fractious comma at Ephesians 4:12. I had argued for its inclusion in “The Results Are In”:

The KJV had it right:

And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

But if the comma after “saints” is removed, which became common beginning with the publication of the Revised Standard Version in 1952, then it is the saints who are doing the ministry rather than the apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastors and teachers. And beginning with this little change, “ministry” began to be seen less as a reference to the preaching office, and more as a reference to one or another kind of service or program or group within the church.[5]

The “Lead Time” interview with Dr. Scudieri responds to this. First, he suggests that the early church, being less formalized in the pre-Constantinian years, was more geared toward mission and evangelism (more “missional,” that is), but when the church became more institutional, this “took the initiative away from local Christians and from the Church at the local level.” His discussion soon leads to the battle between Walther and Grabau at the time the Synod was founded and Walther’s insistence on congregational supremacy. And here he brings up the contested passage in Ephesians 4 and the controversy over the comma. At this point Mr. Kalleberg brings up my article: “Somebody decided to do a critique of Christ Greenfield and wrote a whole newsletter article about it.” Here he asks Pastor Ahlman, “What's the name of that publication, Tim?” And Ahlman responds, “Gottesdienst.” Then Kalleberg continues, “A guy watched our livestream, and he also scanned our website. And, you know, he could have just called us and asked us questions if there was anything unclear about it.” (I didn’t need to do that, incidentally, because nothing was unclear to me.) “In his article, he mentioned the comma and he was very passionate and adamant that the comma belonged in there because he wanted to stand by the belief that it's not the lay people that are doing ministry; it's the people who are specially called that do it.”

At this point Scudieri admits that the comma is in the KJV, but that in the RSV it was taken out, and after that the great majority of English translations left the comma out, and Scudieri takes this as a kind of proof that the comma shouldn’t be there. John N. Collins traces this painstakingly in his important little manuscript, Are All Christians Ministers? (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992), showing that this change came about in the 1971 version of the RSV,[6] and he references Hans-Ruedi Weber, director of Bible studies for the World Council of Churches, who referred to this as a “Copernican change.” The research of Collins leads to the inescapable conclusion that “the idea of a general ministry of all Christians is a thoroughly modern view and that, although it admirably suits the spirit of our democratic age, it is ultimately only as sound as the interpretation of Ephesians 4:11–13 on which it mainly rests.” [7]

What of that passage, then? In particular, what of the comma? The original Greek, of course, admits no punctuation marks at all, leaving it to interpreters to decide where they belong when translated. So, for centuries the prevailing view was to insert a comma after “saints,” in which case it is the apostles etc. who are the ones doing the ministry, but when the RSV removed the comma, it became the saints who do it, being so equipped by the apostles etc.

For all the debating about the comma, surprisingly little has been said about the word καταρτισμον, which the KJV has translated “perfecting” while RSV has opted for “equip[ping].” Ancient, original use of the term tends strongly to favor “perfecting,” as in perfecting a thing for its final destination or use,[8] and, more significantly, St. Paul’s use of the term always has the import of completion, of making perfect and complete.[9] Never does Paul have the concept of equipping for service in mind when he uses this term. Hence the idea newly minted by the removal of the comma, that the apostles etc. were given an order to equip the saints to do something, namely in this case, to minister, is simply incongruent with Paul’s use of καταρτιζω/καταρτισμον anywhere else in his epistles. Not only, therefore, is equipping the saints for ministry a thoroughly novel idea historically speaking, it is also foreign to Paul’s use of the term.

Rather, the KJV translators (as usual) understood the import of the passage correctly, interpreting it as giving the purpose for which Christ gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some pastors and teachers; and that purpose is toward the perfecting, that is, the completion, of the saints. The substance of the work of the ministry of the apostles etc. is, in other words, “the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (vv. 12–13). Nothing in this entire context refers to the activities of the saints, but rather the destination of the saints. The excision of the comma has the effect of putting into this passage a concept that is simply not in view. While, to be sure, the life of sanctification is commonly a concern of Paul’s, and he speaks of it often, that subject is not here.

What is here, rather, is the purpose for which the Office of the Ministry was established, and here it’s worth saying that the pastoral office is not some “elite” group, or “some hierarchical group of guys,” as they routinely and falsely charge us with thinking; rather, it exists for the edifying of the Body of Christ. The reason confessional Lutherans insist that it’s the pastors who do the ministering is that if this is not maintained, it’s not the pastors who are harmed but the saints to whom they minister.

Those saints are, of course, elsewhere exhorted to serve one another in love, and here the Second Table of the Commandments comes to mind, but the Body of Christ has many parts, and it isn’t helpful to confuse those parts (see 1 Cor 12:1–20). But confusion has most certainly resulted from the unfortunate removal of that fractious comma. Let us, rather, insist: the comma must stay.

[1] Feb. 24, 2026, youtube.com/watch?v=YQMMBNcrWnQ.

[2] Tyndale, 1970.

[3] Resolution 13-02A (2016).

[4] Resolution 6-02 (2023).

[5] Gottesdienst, Christmas 2025:4, 8.

[6] Collins, 18f.

[7] Collins, 22–24, emphasis mine.

[8] James Moulton and George Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament (1930), s.v. καταρτιζω.

[9] See Rom 9:22, 1 Cor 1:10, 2 Cor 13:11, 2 Cor 13:9, Gal 6:1, 1 Thess 3:10.

 [PE1]Did you mean to use a URL that goes to a particular point in the video? Because that’s what it does - it goes to 17 min in, but it’s not talking about Gottesdienst. I changed the URL to be the video directly, starting at the beginning.

 [BE2]Good, that’s better

 [PE3]This may be smoother than “the idea of the things the saints do”

 [BE4]Yes, that’s much better

Since last week was Holy Week, and a veery busy time, it’s worth repeating that a Can’t Miss Gottesdienst Conference is coming up EARLY IN MAY.

At Redeemer in Fort Wayne, Monday - Wednesday, May 4 - 6, 2026, we’re going to hear from keynote speaker Dr. William Weinrich, who is well known among us, having been a professor specializing in Early Church history for decades at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne.

Read all about it, and REGISTER here.

“Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”

On this Easter Monday, as we hear the account of the road to Emmaus in Luke 24, in which Our Lord lays out for his apostles the “things concerning himself” in the Old Testament, some of the antiphons at Lauds seem especially striking. The five psalm antiphons at Lauds, on a normal weekday, are typically an excerpted line or two from the psalm or Old Testament canticle in question. So, for example, on a typical Monday throughout the year, the psalms and antiphons at Lauds would look like this:

Psalm 51 - Miserere mei, Deus
An. Have mercy upon me,* O God.

Psalm 5 - Verba mea
An. Consider* my meditation, O Lord.

Psalm 63/67 – Deus Deus meus
An. Early will I seek Thee,* O God.

The Song of Isaiah (Isaiah 12:1–6) - Confitebor tibi
An. Thine anger is turned away,* O Lord, and thou comfortedst me.

Psalms 148–150 – Laudate Dominum
An. Praise God* in the heights.

In every case above, the ferial antiphons are drawn more or less directly from the text itself, with the Benedictus antiphon also typically following this pattern. (Monday Benedictus antiphon: Blessed* be the God of Israel.)

On feasts and in various seasons, however, antiphons particular to the occasion are appointed. The Lauds antiphons for Easter and its octave (with the usual festal psalms) can be found below.

Psalm 93 – Dominus regnavit
An. For the angel of the Lord descended from heaven,* and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it, alleluia, alleluia.

Psalm 100 – Jubilate Deo
An. And, behold, there was a great earthquake:* for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, alleluia.

Psalm 63/67 – Deus Deus meus
An. His countenance was like lightning,* and his raiment white as snow, alleluia.

Benedicite omnia opera
An. And for fear of him the keepers did shake,* and became as dead men, alleluia.

Psalms 148–150 – Laudate Dominum
An. And the angel answered and said unto the women,* Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, alleluia.

As you look through the antiphons above, you see that they are, more or less, the account of the resurrection from Matthew 28, as heard at the Vigil of Easter, traced out line by line. But it isn’t just that — if you look closely, you begin to see the genius of the ancient order of the Daily Office.

In the first Psalm (Dominus regnavit), the imagery is that of God as king, robed in majesty, seated on his throne, whose voice is more powerful than the roaring waves of the sea. The antiphon from St. Matthew’s Gospel helps us to see with fresh eyes the angel seated on the stone of the tomb, who demonstrates that, in the resurrection of Christ, even God’s angels are “enthroned” over the power of death, similar to the language of the beloved Easter chorale, “Jesus Christ, My Sure Defense,” which places death underneath the feet of the Christian:

Laugh to scorn the gloomy grave
And at death no longer tremble;
He, the Lord, who came to save
Will at last His own assemble.
They will go their Lord to meet,
Treading death beneath their feet.

But the fourth antiphon is the one that caught my attention in particular. The Benedicite is sung on every Sunday and feast, and its origin is in the book of Daniel, as the song of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Ananias, Azarias, and Misael) when they are thrown into the midst of the fiery furnace after they refusal to bow down and worship the idol of Nebuchadnezzar. The furnace was so hot that “the flame of the fire slew those men that took up Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego.” The antiphon for the Benedicite in the Easter octave draws the parallel between those Babylonian guards who sought to carry out Nebuchadnezzar’s orders and kill the righteous three young men, and the guards who guarded the tomb of the perfect Son of God, who “became as dead men.” The image is the same in both instances: the life of the righteous is preserved, while those who seek to kill him “fall into their own nets.” Quite beautifully, this is commemorated throughout the year by the usual Sunday antiphon for the Benedicite: “I see three men walking in the midst of the fire, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.” Thus the promise of the resurrection is carried through the Sunday office the remainder of the year, and we are reminded that the one who walked through the fire with the three young men is the same one who walks through the fire with us, and the one who has burst the bonds of death and triumphed over the grave will finally see his enemies cast down and unable to rise.

“Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”

[Note: This is Today’s Devotion based on the Treasury of Daily Prayer lectionary — Ed.]

Heb 9:1-28

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

The author of Hebrews explains the “regulations for worship” in the “first covenant.” He makes reference to the tabernacle that God commanded the Israelites to build (Ex 26-31). It was a place of beauty, with the Most Holy Place being where the Presence of God dwelt. It was a place unlike anything else on earth: precious metals, beautiful fabric, the “bread of the Presence,” vested priests, and incense.

Many Christians consider this worship (and its “regulations”) a thing of the past, something we have outgrown. Our worship is now free to be anything, even a stage with performers imitating the best entertainment that the world has to offer. Many consider the idea of a Most Holy Place where God’s Presence dwells, a place of beauty and reverence, to be a thing of the past. But Scripture teaches us otherwise. For these details of the tabernacle were “copies of the heavenly things,” that is, “copies of the true things, but into heaven itself,” in which “Christ has entered.” For this true sanctuary where Christ entered was not “made with hands,” but was built by God Himself.

What has changed between the covenants is that Jesus is our High Priest and our Victim. He completed the token sacrifices that used to be offered “repeatedly,” that is, the earthly preview of “the blood of goats and calves.” He has offered “His own blood” as the fulfillment. And as the High Priest, He entered “once for all into the holy places,” entering on our behalf, “securing an eternal redemption” for us.

So our sanctuaries ought to continue to copy the “heavenly things,” which is to say, our worship should remind everyone of the sanctuary of the tabernacle and temple. The “earthly place of holiness” should still be beautiful, otherworldly, and reverent, pointing us to what the eternal worship in heaven looks like. For worship is not about our entertainment, but rather our confession of Christ our High Priest and Lamb, our “once for all” sacrifice offered for “the purification of the flesh,” the “sacrifice of Himself.” The “bread of the Presence” has been fulfilled by the body of Christ. The blood of beasts has been fulfilled by the “cup” which is “the new covenant in [Christ’s] blood” (1 Cor 11:25). The sacrifice is not repeated, but the “sacrament” – that is, the “mystery” – is distributed, eaten, and drunk by Christians “in remembrance of” our Great High Priest, “as often” (1 Cor 11:25) as we “do this” (1 Cor 11:24-25).

Christian worship of the New Covenant fulfills the Israelite worship of the Old Covenant. For our worship is not limited to temples in Jerusalem or on Mount Gerizim, but rather we worship “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:21-24) all over the world in copies of the heavenly temple, places where the Good News is proclaimed, where the true Bread of the Presence is distributed, and where the true blood of the Lamb is shared from the cup.

Our worship in earthly copies will continue until our Lord returns. For “Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for Him.” And this mystery of faith, this heavenly worship that we are privileged to join in earthly copies, this Presence of our High Priest and Lamb, this cry of “Worthy!” that we offer to the only one who can break the seals (Rev 5:1-14) is far greater than any emotionally-manipulative performance or stage show made by hands.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! [R: He is risen indeed! Alleluia!]

Tell us, O Mary Magdalene, out of whom were driven seven demons, what did you see? You saw the tomb of Christ, who is living, you saw the glory of his resurrection; you saw bright angels attesting; you saw the shroud and napkin resting there. You heard them say that Christ, your hope, is arisen, that he will go before you into Galilee.

And then you saw Christ himself! You supposed he was the gardener, which was a logical supposition, for it was in a garden that you saw him, and you did not yet know that he had risen. So, therefore, the gardener may well know where his body was; he may even be the one who has taken it, now that the stone had been removed. A logical supposition, for when you first heard the angelic tidings, you could not yet believe it could be. For you went out quickly, and fled from the sepulcher; you trembled and were amazed. You were afraid, and you said nothing to anyone.

But then, after that, you returned, you came back to the place, you lingered, you wished, you hoped; yes, your lingering in the garden tells us that it may have been then that you began daring to hope, to wonder, to believe anew. But still you could not let yourself, and so when he whom you thought to be the gardener asked why you were weeping, you replied, Sir, if you have borne him hence, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.

And then he spoke your name: Mary. And at once you knew, and believed, and your heart thrilled, and exulted: The voice of my beloved! My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up! Mary! And you fell to the ground, and held his feet, until he said to you, Touch me not, for I have not yet ascended to my Father.

So you learned, as we must learn, that it is now, today, after the forty days in which he appeared to his disciples, after his ascension, after Pentecost, after years of annual celebrations of Easter, this year, today, at our celebration of the Resurrection of our Lord, we may at last touch him, in the Blessed Sacrament. For he said to you, not yet; not until I have ascended. So now that he has ascended, your touching and ours is wondrously permitted.

Tell us, O John, who had once leaned upon Jesus’ breast, you, to whom at the cross he had given his mother, you, who knew yourself to be one whom Jesus loved, what did you see? You also saw the tomb where Christ had lain. You outran Peter to the sepulcher, and so arrived first but waited in deference to your elder, who was first among the Apostles, so Peter saw first: the linen clothes lying, and the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself. You saw that everything was in order. Perhaps it was then that you, like Mary Magdalene, dared to begin hoping, for everything was in order. For when you went in, and you saw that, you began to believe. You finally let yourself begin to believe what he had been saying to you all along, that he must rise from the dead.

But still you must have doubted, for him you did not see, and then, at evening, you were with all the twelve in the upper room, and you shut the doors for fear of the Jews. See, you were still afraid; your heart, wanting to believe, was still held back from believing, still could not quite bring itself to that point; but then Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. And when he had so said, he showed you his hands and his side.

So you inspected, you looked, you handled, you believed; at last, you believed, and then you were glad, when you saw the Lord. And then said Jesus to you again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And so you, John, became Apostle and Evangelist, and wrote these things, these very words, that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing we might have life through his name. For we were not there, but you were there; we did not see, but you saw; our hearts were not first held back and then freed, but yours was; and because you were there, and saw, and believed, and have testified, we therefore have your testimony, that on this glad Easter Day our hearts may leap with joy, and we may share in your gladness.

Tell us, O disciples who walked in gloom and sorrow on the Emmaus road, whose hope had died, who said to the Stranger who began to walk with you, We were hoping that it had been Jesus who died which should have redeemed Israel. You said you were hoping; you were no longer hoping. Your hope had died. But then he talked with you by the way, and what happened? Your heart began to burn within you, while he opened to you the scriptures. Your heart burned, as you began to suspect, like the others—could it be? Could it possibly be?—that he who walked with you on the way was himself the Way on which you walked.

 And so as you drew nigh unto the village, whither you went: and he made as though he would have gone further, you constrained him, hearts burning, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with you. And your heart burned all the more, for as he opened the Scriptures to you, he was also leading you back to himself, who is your Hope, your Joy, your Life, your Rock, your Strength, your Beloved, risen from dead. And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with you, he took bread, and blessed it, and broke, and gave to you. And it was then that your eyes were opened, and you knew him; and he vanished out of your sight. We were not there, but you were there; and we did not join that blessed Emmaus meal with you that day, but—alleluia!—we join you this day, this happy Easter Day, we join you today, for we know him in the Supper, just as you did.

 Tell us, O all ye witnesses of the resurrection, how you had lost all hope, but then he came to you and revived you, and you began to believe the unbelievable; you started to hope the unimaginable; you dared to trust the impossible, that Christ who was dead had—could it be?—actually risen from the dead, as he had said he would. For our hearts burn within us this day. And we begin, and dare, and, hoping against hope, are learning to believe what the Scripture saith, that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

Tell us today, so that we, too, may know that the burning of our hearts—the confidence, the hope and rediscovery that the Lord is risen indeed—is none other but the flame of the Holy Ghost kindled in us by the glad tidings that you bring of the resurrection of our Lord; that we may join the chorus that with exuberant hearts has through the ages cried out to one another ever since the very days you yourselves have said it: Alleluia! Christ is risen! [R: He is risen indeed! Alleluia!]

This sermon was preached at St Paul’s Lutheran Church in Kewnaee, Illinois, on Easter Sunday, April 1, 2018

St. Matthew 27:57-66:

Now when evening had come, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who himself had also become a disciple of Jesus. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate commanded the body to be given to him. When Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his new tomb which he had hewn out of the rock; and he rolled a large stone against the door of the tomb, and departed. And Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary, sitting opposite the tomb.

On the next day, which followed the Day of Preparation, the chief priests and Pharisees gathered together to Pilate, saying, “Sir, we remember, while He was still alive, how that deceiver said, After three days I will rise.’ Therefore command that the tomb be made secure until the third day, lest His disciples come by night and steal Him away, and say to the people, ‘He has risen from the dead.’ So the last deception will be worse than the first.”

Pilate said to them, “You have a guard; go your way, make it as secure as you know how.” So they went and made the tomb secure, sealing the stone and setting the guard.

Meditation: Here faith triumphs over all evil and darkness. For Jesus is now crucified, dead, and buried, and a stone blocks the tomb. But in spite of all this dread for the eyes to see, there was Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, sitting over against the tomb. How faithful were these women! For they, in spite of all the grief that this experience and sight gave them, remained faithful to their Lord and His word (for He had told them to be watchful). So there they sit; yea, there sits faith, keeping watch in the hour of darkness. So does faith triumph over darkness and the grave. On whose behalf, then, do these women sit and keep watch? On behalf of all the faithful ones, the very Bride of Christ. No darkness can daunt them, no grief nor sorrow can dissuade them, for in spite of their weeping they remained faithful, now, to their dead Lord, somehow knowing still that He is the Resurrection and the Life. Holy Saturday marks the triumph of faith, expecting Easter.

• from Every Day Will I Bless Thee: Meditations for the Daily Office (Sussex, WI: Concordia Catechetical Academy, 1992).

Sometimes we get a glimpse, and it’s marvelous. But in order to catch this glimpse, we must see with the eyes of faith. We must see as the Greeks were bidden to see, for their asking of Philip, Sir, we would see Jesus (St. John 12:21). Philip referred this request to Andrew, who in turn asked the Lord Himself, who replied, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified.

Behold how this request was transmitted: it was handed on through Philip and Andrew, the very same disciples Jesus had tested at the feeding of the five thousand. Then, Jesus had asked Philip, Whence shall we buy bread, that these may eat? And Philip, exasperated, had no clue, nor did Andrew, who, though a lad had presented him with five loaves and two fish, could only manage to say, What are they among so many? (St. John 6:5-9) And this same Andrew was the very one who had first followed Jesus’ invitation, Come and see, and, having done so, exclaimed to his brother Simon, We have found the Messiah. And likewise Philip had announced to Nathanial, We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph (St. John 1:39-45). So these two disciples are recognized by the Evangelist as disciples who should have known when tested, but who failed. And now, through the relay of the request from the Greeks to Jesus, they are learning just how to see him. Now they are learning how to live by faith. Now they are about to find out how to see Jesus: The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. For he who is himself the holy corn of wheat must fall into the ground and die, that he might bring forth much fruit.

To see him glorified is not to see him in splendor but in his Passion. His glory is his cross, and accordingly, his day of agony we call Good Friday.

So on Good Friday let us consider the bidding of Pilate (of all people!): Behold the man. Look upon him in his affliction and see there how he is winning back the Paradise lost by the first man. And again, consider what Pilate (of all people!) wrote about him: JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS. For he would not alter this when asked, but replied, What I have written I have written. And in the greatest of ironies, Pilate, himself unaware of what he was saying and writing, was right. Not only so, but here was Jesus at this very moment procuring his kingdom, by his own humiliation.

Would you see Jesus? Then behold the man, precisely where he is designated the King of the Jews. Behold him there with faith, and there you will have your glimpse of his glory. For by his stripes we are healed.