Our good friend and favorite Baptist brother, IMonk has written a great post on his blog about trusting the Gospel to do its work. This is such an important point, regardless of which theological tradition you are from. Here is an excerpt from his essay:

“You have to preach the Gospel and trust it to the work it should do.
Two mistakes to avoid:
1) Making your own agenda the “to do” list for the Holy Spirit. That’s a big leap: I want it to happen so God wants it to happen.
2) Turning to other motivations- like guilt, condemnation, guilt, manipulation and guilt- to get the work done.
Really. This is so important and so true.
If the Holy Spirit isn’t going to produce it by constant, earnest presentation of the Gospel to the people of God, then does it need to happen?”

We say “AMEN!!”
You can read the rest of his post here.

Here’s a very worthwhile product that I wish we carried. The Good Shepherd Institute of Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, under the direction of Kantor Richard Resch has produced a fantastic DVD, entitled “Singing the Faith.”

This DVD is an historical documentary focusing on the rich history of Lutheran hymnody. Through music, interviews and narration, this 80-minute presentation helps the viewer discover the amazing treasury of Reformation music and worship. The production values are first rate, and it is evident that the producers spared no expense in its creation. It is viewable in four 20 minute segments, and comes with a 32 page teacher’s guide that makes it especially suitable for use in Sunday School or small groups. Check out the DVD here.

You may download a 12 minute overview video of the project here (requires QuickTime):

Small (13 Mb)
Medium (35 Mb)

Concordia Publishing House has exclusive distribution rights to this fine presentation, and you can find the links to purchase this resource at the links above. I really wish we could carry this marvelous piece of scholarship, but I am just glad that it’s available, and we are more than happy to promote it. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

In recent weeks, I’ve been watching our own Pat Kyle and a few other Lutherans in a rehashing of the baptism debate with some Baptist folks. It’s been very interesting, and even a little heated in a few places.

But I think this brings about an excellent opportunity to highlight a source that we Lutherans often refer to in this debate, and which is something that we also offer here at New Reformation Press. Hey, we are working only to make the best educational stuff available and this is no exception.

Uuras Saarnivaara wrote Scriptural Baptism: A Dialogue between John Bapstead and Martin Childfont in 1953, and it remains a very solid text which covers an amazing amount of ground regarding this debate in a very short space.

First, here is a little bit about Dr. Saarnivaara’s origins:

Dr. Uuras Saarnivaara, son of a Lutheran minister, was born in Nurmijarvi, Finland, in 1908. He studied in the Theological Department of the University of Helsinki from 1926 to 1930 and was ordained a minister in 1930 for the Lutheran Church of Finland. He served several parishes in Finland and did graduate work at the University of Helsinki, receiving his M.A. degree in 1936 and his Candidate of Theology (now called Licentiate of Theology) in 1939. From 1936 to 1937 he studied in the London College of Divinity. In 1939, he was called to the chair of theology at Suomi Theological Seminary, Hancock, Michigan. He did graduate work in historical theology at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago from 1943 to 1945, receiving his Ph.D. degree in 1945. In 1948 he returned to Finland and received the degree of Th.D. from the University of Helsinki. Among his other books is Luther Discovers the Gospel.

Now, without quoting the entire text, I would like to highlight a particular section which discusses a very interesting point regarding infant baptism. (The debate in which Pat and the other Lutherans are involved originally started with a discussion on infant baptism and now is focused on a smaller point in 1 Peter 3:21, trying to clarify this part before returning to the original discussion on infant baptism.)

For your consideration, this first from the introduction so that you can understand who is arguing which point:

Martin Childfont and John Bapstead were neighbors in the city of Zion. The former was a member of a church that practice infant baptism. The latter belonged to a church that taught that baptism is the immersion or dipping of a person in water, on confession of faith in Christ, administered in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit. [1]

Martin and John had originally been members of the same church, and both of them had been baptized as infants. But John had become converted to the faith of those who opposed infant baptism, whereas Martin had come to a personal faith and knowledge of Christ as his Savior in his own church. For a while he too had struggled with doubt about infant baptism; but his study of the Scriptures and literature on baptism had led him to the conviction that the baptism that he had received in his infancy was a Biblical baptism, and that he did not need to be baptized anew.

John and Martin had occasionally exchanged opinions on baptism. But one night they decided to discuss the subject more thoroughly. Although the conversation lasted several hours they were unable to reach a conclusion and agreed to continue it the next day. John starts the actual discussion.

And now a little further on in the infant baptism discussion:

Martin: Abraham was the first man ever to be circumcised. Don’t you think that his circumcision was the pattern of the significance of that rite?

John: I think you are right there. I had never thought of it from that point of view.

Martin: You admit, then, that circumcision, too, was an external sign of an inward spiritual grace. This is obvious also from the fact that circumcision was the sign of the covenant which included the promise “to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee.” [7] The profit of the circumcision was, as Paul says, that “they were entrusted with the oracles of God.” [8] God’s promise to be their God and His word certainly meant much more than a mere external union with a national congregation.

I am sure you have read how Moses emphasized that mere external circumcision was not enough. A circumcision of the heart was needed in order that the Israelites be true people of God. “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your hearts, and be not stiffnecked.” [9] Another time Moses promised, “The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord, thy God, with all thine heart.” [10] Jeremiah [11] and Apostle Paul [12] also speak of the circumcision of the heart as the spiritual meaning and fulfillment of the rite of circumcision. Don’t you see, brother John, that the entire Bible teaches circumcision as an external sign of an internal grace?

John: Well, I must again concede that you are right and that I haven’t been careful enough in studying and considering this matter.

Martin: The inward spiritual grace that circumcision signified was a renewal of the heart to faith, love to God, and willing obedience to Him. When Paul deals with the question of circumcision he shows that although it required faith, and some people were faithless, the covenant remained in force on God’s side. It was broken only on the part of men. “For what if some were without faith? Shall their want of faith make of none effect the faithfulness of God?” [13]

The words show that God’s covenant and his faithfulness to it were unchanging and objectively valid realities, but men could enjoy the blessings of the covenant only through a personal faith and obedience. Its subjective blessings depended on faith. In the case of Abraham the personal prerequisite, namely, faith, preceded the rite, but otherwise the inward circumcision or renewal to faith and obedience followed afterward.

John: I must admit again that your explanation seems to follow the statements of the Bible.

Martin: You admitted some time ago that circumcision and baptism are analogous, since Paul calls baptism the circumcision of Christ, or Christian circumcision. In the case of Abraham, circumcision was a seal of the righteousness of faith that he had before this rite. It corresponds to the baptism of people who are converted before baptism, as Cornelius and his household were, and as often happens even in our time. But most Israelites received circumcision as infants; when they reached the age of discretion they had to appropriate its blessings and fulfill its requirements afterward, although the majority of them never did so. Here circumcision is analogous to infant baptism. Isn’t it, brother John?

John: I cannot deny that it is. But a mere analogy doesn’t suffice to establish a Christian doctrine.

Martin: You are right; a mere analogy is not enough here. But I wish to add one more thought on the relationship between circumcision and baptism. Paul calls baptism the circumcision of Christ, and an undeniable fact is that, according to the plan of God, the use of circumcision was to cease when the use of baptism started in its full Christian sense after Pentecost. You deny that baptism took the place of circumcision. Nevertheless, in my view that thought is implied in the two facts that I mentioned. I cannot, of course, force you to follow my line of thought, but in my view this logic is inescapable.

John: I see now that the idea of baptism in the place of circumcision can be defended with the Bible. I can no longer oppose it categorically, as I did at the outset.

There is much more covered in the rest of the text of the book, but this is a gleaming nugget in the midst of it all. This is not a quick discussion and certainly is not likely to be hammered out in the small space of a blog entry and the following comments.

Since this is such a hot topic to so many and you may find yourself having more and more questions in your own studies, if you have not yet read Dr. Saarnivaara’s book, we highly recommend you pick it up. It probably won’t answer all your questions, but it is simply a tour-de-force on the subject.

As the discussion between the Lutherans and the Baptists continues, I may post an update to this here as well.

Either way, enjoy and I hope you find this as stimulating as we do!

While searching around on the web I came across some Youtube videos by a man named Josh Garrels. I am usually not a fan of any kind of contemporary Christian music, but I thought this was pretty good, and so I thought I would share it with our friends that visit the NRP blog.

(HT: internetmonk.com)

Pastor Bill Cwirla posted this on one of his blogs the other day. I was involved in a discussion on another blog concerning this subject and it had been on my mind a great deal lately. The subject: Lutheran Insularity. In plain language, why do we seem so unfriendly, and never seem to interact much with other Christians? To be honest there is more than a little truth to these charges in some quarters. Some have compared us to the Ephesian Church in the Revelation (Rev.2:1-7), doctrinally pure, yet lacking in love and zeal. I will reproduce Pastor Cwirla’s comments in their entirety here:

I’ve been having a good, hard think lately about a lot of things. This is typical of summer for me, where I permit myself the luxury of not being bound to the tyranny of clocks and calendars and allow myself a healthy dose of daydreaming. I’ve been thinking about fruit lately, not only the peaches, plums, nectarines, strawberries, blueberries, and pluots (one of my favorites!) of summer, but also the delectable fruit of the Spirit that St. Paul describes in his letter to the Galatian churches: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-discipline. “By their fruit you will know them,” Jesus said of religious teachers, and this got me thinking.

I’m not thinking in terms of those static dogmatic categories of justification and sanctification, though these certainly are lurking in the background. Rather, I’m thinking about how things look. How we as Lutherans look. I’ve been surfing around the internet looking at what Lutherans are up to, what they are saying about each other, about their church bodies, about other Christians. I like to Google my name to see what others are saying about me. Others send me emails with links to what people are saying about Higher Things.

St. Paul sets the fruit of the Spirit in contrast with the works of the adamic flesh: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I wonder sometimes. I wonder if the way we act, especially under the “anonymity” of the internet, doesn’t reflect more of the sinner that we are in ourselves than the saint that we are in Christ? I’m not talking so much about the cussing and beer drinking that Lutherans are known for; I’m thinking along the lines of the latter part of Paul’s list - enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy. That list more or less describes the tone of some Lutheran lists.

Now I know well the usual Romans 7 dodge to all this. “The good I want to do, I don’t do, and the evil I don’t want to do, I do….wretched man that I am,” simul justus et peccator, and all that. Those aren’t an excuse but a harsh reality that drives us continually to repentance. The last time I checked, Paul doesn’t encourage us to indulge our sinful selves but to put to death the works of the flesh. Drown that inner brat in Baptism and don’t give him a blog so he can express himself. And God doesn’t describe the fruit of the Spirit as some unattainable goal to drive us to repentance, but as something we can eagerly look forward to, much like fruit in season. You expect it to be there.

The atheist philosopher Nietzsche once commented that he might take the Redeemer more seriously if His followers would look a bit more redeemed. I wonder if there might be people who would take the Lutheran confession of Christianity more seriously if Lutherans would show a bit of summer fruit.

We Lutherans live under a terrible burden of having to be right all the time. We value purity above all things - purity of doctrine, of practice, of hymnody, of programs, of purpose. Yet purity is never held out to the sinner-saint as an attainable goal. It’s a forensic-given in Christ, and utterly impossible in ourselves. If we claim to be “pure” in what we do, we will ever be on the defensive justifying ourselves against those who claim otherwise and constantly measuring ourselves against the next guy. Defensiveness tends to bring out the worst of our sinful selves. Defensiveness and fear open the door to the anger, strife, party spirit, and dissension that war against the fruit of the Spirit.

I believe that much of our Lutheran anxiety has to do with defensiveness and fear. We want to present our denarius back to the Master pure and undefiled. And so we don’t take risks, we play it safe, we hedge our bets, we hide behind the skirts of our institutions, we circle our wagons to ward off the challengers. We wrap our shiny denarius in a sock and tuck it safely in the back of a drawer. But the Master said, “Do business,” not “keep it pure.” We are fearful and defensive, not trusting the Word to do His work, not trusting that God justifies the unjustifiable and ungodly, acting as though Jesus needed us to defend Him. Poor Jesus. And in our fear and unbelief, we stunt the fruit the Spirit wants to produce in us for the benefit of others.

I worry about my fellow Lutheran pilgrims who have become so wrapped up in defending their “being Lutheran” that they have lost the sense of wonder and joy at being justified for Jesus’ sake. I wonder whether we haven’t become the Ephesian church of the Revelation, doctrinally pure yet loveless, able to spot a heretical Nicolaitan from a mile away, yet flagging in the love that once characterized life together. I grieve over young Lutherans who are already so narrow in their thinking, they cannot enjoy the fullness of the gifts God gives to His church, but scowl at a hymn not to their liking or a liturgical practice outside their narrow zone of comfort.

Look at that list again. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-discipline. Yes, I know, we can’t produce these things in ourselves; they are the fruit of the Spirit. I know that we don’t produce this fruit by trying harder, but I also know that we can get in the way of its production. If our doctrine of Baptism is correct and means anything, we have the Spirit, and therefore, can expect the Spirit’s fruit in due season, justified sinners though we are. This wonderful fruit of the Spirit is not for ourselves to admire but for others to pluck from our branches and enjoy and be refreshed and give glory to God.

And maybe, having been refreshed, they will want to hang out with us under Lutheran shade.

P.S. You can visit the blog in question at http://blog.higherthings.org/wcwirla/