There are many media resources on the Christ Lutheran Church Website which should be explored. I haven’t gone through many of them (yet), but plan to in the future. Good stuff!
Our friend Pastor Matt Richard over at PM Notes has a very insightful post on the kind of pastoring that centers on peace, and love at the expense of biblical truth. This is something I have been contemplating for awhile. In the Confessional wing of the Lutheran Church this is often manifested as a pastoral unwillingness to take on church school administrators when they start dictating terms to the congregation, or a hands off policy regarding Sunday School or other such program, while diligently attending to Word and sacrament. In the interest of avoiding conflict, areas of the Church’s ministry are basically let go.
I was part of a congregation years ago that had a wonderful preschool and preschool facility. We had no Sunday school for our kids because the School did not want the church using the facility. We eventually got a Sunday School started but it was always an issue with the school. My question to the Pastor was ‘Are we a chapel attached to a school or a church with a preschool outreach?” Read Pastor Matt’s view from another angle.
For many years I held to the idea that a healthy church is a loving church. All sorts of love, happiness, warmth, and smiles in a church must make it real and it certainly must make it healthy. As a result of this belief I tried to preserve peace at all costs, while keeping love front and center as the highest ideal in the church. My inclination was to forget principle because warmth, happiness and getting along were of true importance. I have also painfully witnessed and participated in the backlash of ridicule, as well as the vilification of pastors who have disturbed a church’s peaceful bliss by proclaiming unwanted truth.Unfortunately I have subscribed and many churches have endorsed the idea of, “Truth if possible, peace at all cost.”
Over the years as I have read through the scriptures and have had more experience as a pastor, my mind has changed on peace and truth. Please don’t get me wrong now, I don’t deny the importance of having the virtue of love and peace in the church. Peace and harmony in the church are extremely important, but they are not the highest ideal. What changed though? I have come to believe that TheWord (i.e. The Bible) is of the utmost importance and when it is properly divided and taught that there will be tension in the church whether we want it or not. In other words, the inevitable conclusion to the Word being taught and divided properly is tension.
This is one of the best sermons I ever read and its not by a Lutheran.
Back in 1922, Geerhardus Vos, Professor of Biblical Theology at Princeton, published a few of his sermons which he had preached in chapel. The book was called Grace and Glory. Banner of Truth republished it with some added sermons and I got a hold of it during my sojourn at Westminster Seminary, Escondido in the late nineties.
I know we LCMS Lutherans tend to be a sheltered bunch, but seriously, take a few moments to read this. I ran into this sermon again on Kerux* and I had trouble keeping my eyes dry enough to read what was on the screen.
Our text takes us to the tomb of the risen Lord, on the first Sabbath-morning of the New Covenant. It is impossible for us to imagine a spot more radiant with light and joy than was this immediately after the resurrection. Even when thinking ourselves back into the preceding moments, while as yet to the external eye there was nothing but the darkness of death, our anticipation of what we know to be about to happen floods the scene with a twilight of supernatural splendor. The sepulcher itself has become to us prophetic of victory; we seem to hear in the expectant air the wing-beat of the descending angels, come to roll away the stone and announce to us: “The Lord is risen indeed!”
* To show that we promote good things whenever and wherever we find them, here is the quarterly, Kerux: The Journal of Northwest Theological Seminary. Although this Journal is in the Reformed/Calvinistic tradition, it remains an excellent reference for any Pastor or student of scripture wanting to wrestle with the text to see more clearly the unfolding revelation of the Jesus Christ in the History of Redemption. I know for many, Biblical Theology can be a bad word. Vos himself preferred to call his discipline ‘Special Revelation’, a branch of Exegetical Theology which he thought to be the servant of Systematic Theology.
O sacred Head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded with thorns, Thine only crown;
How pale Thou art with anguish, with sore abuse and scorn!
How does that visage languish, which once was bright as morn!
What Thou, my Lord, hast suffered, was all for sinners’ gain;
Mine, mine was the transgression, but Thine the deadly pain.
Lo, here I fall, my Savior! ’Tis I deserve Thy place;
Look on me with Thy favor, vouchsafe to me Thy grace.
Men mock and taunt and jeer Thee, Thou noble countenance,
Though mighty worlds shall fear Thee and flee before Thy glance.
How art thou pale with anguish, with sore abuse and scorn!
How doth Thy visage languish that once was bright as morn!
Now from Thy cheeks has vanished their color once so fair;
From Thy red lips is banished the splendor that was there.
Grim death, with cruel rigor, hath robbed Thee of Thy life;
Thus Thou hast lost Thy vigor, Thy strength in this sad strife.
My burden in Thy Passion, Lord, Thou hast borne for me,
For it was my transgression which brought this woe on Thee.
I cast me down before Thee, wrath were my rightful lot;
Have mercy, I implore Thee; Redeemer, spurn me not!
What language shall I borrow to thank Thee, dearest friend,
For this Thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end?
O make me Thine forever, and should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never outlive my love to Thee.
My Shepherd, now receive me; my Guardian, own me Thine.
Great blessings Thou didst give me, O source of gifts divine.
Thy lips have often fed me with words of truth and love;
Thy Spirit oft hath led me to heavenly joys above.
Here I will stand beside Thee, from Thee I will not part;
O Savior, do not chide me! When breaks Thy loving heart,
When soul and body languish in death’s cold, cruel grasp,
Then, in Thy deepest anguish, Thee in mine arms I’ll clasp.
The joy can never be spoken, above all joys beside,
When in Thy body broken I thus with safety hide.
O Lord of Life, desiring Thy glory now to see,
Beside Thy cross expiring, I’d breathe my soul to Thee.
My Savior, be Thou near me when death is at my door;
Then let Thy presence cheer me, forsake me nevermore!
When soul and body languish, oh, leave me not alone,
But take away mine anguish by virtue of Thine own!
Be Thou my consolation, my shield when I must die;
Remind me of Thy passion when my last hour draws nigh.
Mine eyes shall then behold Thee, upon Thy cross shall dwell,
My heart by faith enfolds Thee. Who dieth thus dies well.
This is certainly a complement to the last post and a fine bit of blogging by Pastor Tchvididjan (below).
We Lutherans pride ourselves on getting the distinction between Law and Gospel right; I wish it were always so, or even mostly so. My experience in the Lutheran church indicates to me that it is often not the case, even for life-long Lutherans. And I know I’m certainly not immune from missing the mark on this main-stem of Lutheran teaching. When corrected, I’m glad of it.
I think Law and Gospel, far from being some sort of artificial construct erected above scripture, is part of scripture’s warp and woof.
Walther’s ‘two words’ are integral to the organic flow of God’s self-disclosure in the text of Scripture. Once in a while, you can get someone from another tradition who can really kick your rear end (in a good way) by reminding you of your own rich heritage.
For centuries, Reformational Theologians have rightly noted that in the Bible God speaks two fundamentally different words: law and gospel. The law is God’s word of demand, the gospel is God’s word of deliverance. The law tells us what to do, the gospel tells us what God has done. So, when we speak of the distinction between law and gospel we are referring to different speech acts–or what linguist John Austin calls “illocutionary stances”–that run throughout the whole Bible. Everything in both the Old Testament and the New Testament is either in the form of an obligatory imperative or a declaratory indicative. “Hence,” wrote Martin Luther, “whoever knows well this art of distinguishing between the law and the gospel, him place at the head and call him a doctor of Holy Scripture.”
Most of the preachers were dynamic, engaging, interesting and even entertaining. Most of their sermons were terrible.
How hard could it be? You go to church. The preacher preaches. You sit and listen. Easy, right?
But how do you tell the difference between a good sermon and a bad sermon? What makes good preaching good, and bad preaching bad?
For several years Issues, Etc. has been doing on–air sermon reviews. We’ve reviewed the sermons of Joel Osteen, D. James Kennedy, T.D. Jakes, Robert Schuller, Joyce Meyer, as well as many less well–known preachers. We’ve reviewed the sermons of Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Eastern Orthodox, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and others. Most of these preachers were speaking to packed auditoriums and to worldwide television audiences. Most of the preachers were dynamic, engaging, interesting, and even entertaining. Most of their sermons were terrible.
Now, who am I to make such a judgment? Nobody. But I don’t make this judgment based on my own subjective tastes or my own personal standard. I make this judgment based on the objective difference between good preaching and bad preaching.
Is there an objective standard for good preaching? Yes. It is a standard every Christian should know and use every time they hear a sermon. Every Christian should know the difference between a good sermon and a bad sermon.
At NRP, we don’t have a problem arguing the facts of Christianity with an unbeliever. And when we’re in the throws of that arguing, it’s not just to shut the other guy up or make them spew their beer (a fun thing if you can manage it!), but perhaps even more so to remove impediments that might hinder them or others from the hearing of the Gospel. This doesn’t violate Lutheran theology one bit; it actually springs from it.
Here’s an excellent Modern Reformation article expressing the reason why the Lutheran should be well suited to offer an objective defense of the hope that lies within him or her (I Peter 3:15).
One of the primary objections to apologetics within Lutheran circles this century is the critique (offered especially by Bultmann and his followers) that Luther’s central conviction that a man is justified by grace through faith and his concomitant refusal to confuse Law with Gospel eliminated for him all uses of objective evidences in “defend-ing” the faith. Luther’s immediate followers, this critique continues, departed from Luther when they returned to Aristotle in endeavoring to establish the truth of faith by objective argument. Such argumentation is foreign to true Lutheran belief, we are told, and must be excised as a cancer.
I remember when it first dawned on me that there might be “problems” with the New Testament. As I casually flipped through the red-lettered words of Jesus in my parents’ study Bible, something surprising caught my eye. There, in the Gospel of John, I noticed a particularly strange footnote. It said something like, “This part is not the same in all ancient manuscripts.” This struck me as rather odd and out of place. Why would a note like that be in the New Testament? Does this mean we don’t know the whole truth about Jesus? Can a book that contains typos really be God’s holy Word?
While we’re on the subject of our upcoming conference speaker, Dr. Rod Rosenbladt, I thought I might share some quotes from the series that he did at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama about seven years ago. These two quotes literally changed my life. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a clear picture of the Gospel.
These are from the first part of his Saturday morning lecture. He spent about an hour doing some theology with us from Romans 3, 4 and 5. Please forgive me if these aren’t exact quotes! I have transcribed them from a very worn-out CD of the lecture.
The mission of Mockingbird (from their website): “Connecting the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life.” That is, demonstrating and cataloging the myriad ways in which the Christian understanding of reality – what people are like, what God is like and how the two intersect – is born out all around us. We want to do so in a way that is both comforting and inspiring, taking care along the way to look for new words for the old story.
But the glory of God is precisely that for our sakes He comes down to the very depths, into human flesh, into the bread, into our mouth, our heart, our bosom; moreover, for our sakes He allows Himself to be treated ingloriously both on the cross and on the altar, as St. Paul says in I Corinthians 11 that some eat the bread in an unworthy manner.
Death indeed tried once, wanting to devour and digest Christ’s flesh; but it could not. This flesh tore death’s stomach and throat into more than a hundred thousand pieces, so that the teeth of the grave fell to pieces and turned to dust, and this flesh of Christ remains alive. For this food was too strong for death, and has devoured and digested it devourer. God is in this flesh. It is God’s flesh, the Spirit’s flesh. It is in God and God is in it. Therefore it lives and gives life to all who eat it, both to their bodies and to their souls.
Therefore Christ wills to be in us by nature, in both our soul and body, according to the word in John 6, ‘He who eats Me abides in Me and I in him.’ If we eat Him spiritually through the Word, He abides in us spiritually in our soul; if one eats Him physically, He abides in us physically and we in Him. As we eat Him, He abides in us and we in Him. For He is not digested or transformed; but ceaselessly He transforms us-our soul into righteousness, our body into immortality. So the ancient fathers spoke of the physical eating.
Michael Grooms from Christ Lutheran Church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota let us know about this excellent series on sermon preparation done by Dr. Carl Fickenscher II, Professor of Pastoral Ministry and Missions at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne. If you are not a pastor, this is still for you – very much worth your time.
This is certainly a complement to the last post and a fine bit of blogging by 
From the archives over at 
At NRP, we don’t have a problem arguing the facts of Christianity with an unbeliever. And when we’re in the throws of that arguing, it’s not just to shut the other guy up or make them spew their beer (a fun thing if you can manage it!), but perhaps even more so to remove impediments that might hinder them or others from the hearing of the Gospel. This doesn’t violate Lutheran theology one bit; it actually springs from it.
