Whether the Unvaccinated, Too, Can Be Saved

Soon the churches will be thronged or at least fuller than usual. As the people come into a sanctuary familiar or a little unfamiliar to them, ask yourself a few questions. What is the vaccination status of those people shuffling into unfamiliar pews? Have the college kids back in a church for the first time in months received their booster shots? Do these questions seem silly to you?

They aren’t silly to many, including governments in Europe and Canada, not even to our own federal government, which speaks to the unvaccinated as if they are a class of demons destined to torture and to be tortured while the righteous vaccinated shall persevere through every trial. Such questions already shape policy in German Lutheran congregations now requiring one’s Covid-19 status to determine entry into the house of God (a policy commonly called 3G abbreviating the German words for “recovered,” “vaccinated,” and “tested”). That policy is recommended by the government and required by some congregations, here for example. Easily and swiftly what is said in media broadcasts becomes required in churches. There is no time to ask whether Romans 13 means that everything someone in government says or proposes is constitutional. There is no time to ask whether the church must regulate its worship according to governmental dictate, as if the three young men’s worship should have been to the golden statue Nebuchadnezzar had commanded them to worship instead of to the true God. There is no time to distinguish between what is legal (abortion, for example) and what is godly (not committing murder). Conscience has no time to ponder or to compare the dictates with Scripture. Compliance is required now.

The invasion of everyone’s conscience by governmental and media pronouncements is not a matter for the church’s silence. If I am silent on something affecting people’s understanding of how daily life functions, what will I choose to discuss instead? Luther’s protest against indulgences mattered not because it was the hottest topic of medieval academic theology but because it impinged on what Christians did with their lives. The church cannot let her people’s lives and hearts be determined by everything except God’s Word.

We have perhaps been silent on practically all matters of everyday life except abortion because to speak about the required HR training in diversity that means our people’s tacit assent to transsexual ideology or about the incessant consumption of social media and news that sets everyone’s teeth and tempers on edge would be “too political” from the pulpit. But our consciences have all been informed therefore largely by educational history and media consumption, largely by Fox or CNN or MSNBC, largely by Apple News or Breitbart. The Word of God did not change in the past two years. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are still divine institutions. We are still encouraged to meet together, not neglecting to do so, as is the habit of some. God’s Word did not change between January 2020 and January 2022. What our phones and TVs told us changed, so we changed.

In the past two years the divisions that have opened up in our churches were therefore predictable. We often broke sharply along the lines of media consumption with vastly differing perceptions of what was true, what was worthwhile, what was good. This has created clean breaks in what were once small fissures in the body of Christ. These divisions have deepened with the media portrayal of dissent from official Covid-19 policies as “selfish,” which some Christians have explained to themselves as “not keeping the Fifth Commandment” if you are not (as time has gone on and media messaging has changed) not masked if you’re not sick, then masked, then double-vaccinated, now perhaps boosted.

We have now come to a time of decision about what will rule our consciences. When the people of God do not know the Word of God and therefore do not prize the Lord’s Supper as their highest good on earth, they will first neglect the Supper because they were told that it’s dangerous to their health and then find they have no taste for this feast of love. They love many things, including eating out at restaurants and traveling, about which they see lots of advertising, but since their conscience is not bound to God’s Word, the Supper they can do without. Of course church now seems very dangerous when in December 2019 or January 2020 it was nothing of the kind to anyone.

The past two years in our churches have not been a series of unexpected, one-off events. They are an ongoing trial in expected consequences. We who did not heed the Word of God that would unite us have heeded everything that will and does divide us. We did not know God’s Word so our consciences were bound to the latest constitutionally debatable executive order or court ruling. We did not know God’s Word so the possibility of excluding people from the Divine Service because they did not share politically acceptable understandings of masks, vaccines, distancing, or the evils of gathering in large groups has become normal to some of us. We did not know God’s Word so slavery to media buzz seems normal to us. Didn’t you see [this latest outrage/cause for deep concern/etc.] on the news?, we ask each other. We may teach the doctrines of men, but since we have been so well catechized in them, they sound to us like the commandments of God. The accumulation of new doctrines is exactly what our forefathers protested in the church,

If bishops have the right to burden churches with infinite traditions, and to ensnare consciences, why does Scripture so often prohibit to make, and to listen to, traditions? Why does it call them “doctrines of devils”? 1 Tim. 4:1. Did the Holy Ghost in vain forewarn of these things? (Augsburg Confession XXVIII:49)

Now is the time to repent. Before vaccination is required for entry into God’s House, now is the time. Before our debates are about how many vaccinations and boosters we have received so that we can receive God’s gifts, now is the time. Before we go back into closing down our own churches for fear, now is the time. We have for too long let the media and everything else except God’s Word control our sense of right and wrong, our sense of guilt and shame, our sense of good and evil. Now is the time for change. God is giving us opportunity to repent. We have to turn back to His Word before opportunity passes.

We can have churches where some people are vaccinated and some are not. We can have churches where some people wear masks and some do not. We can have churches in which Christians do not all have the same idea about matters the Word of God does not determine: how much daily life should be changed by a widespread respiratory illness, how long children should wear masks in public schools, and on and on. We can have churches where only the Word of God determines what is right and what is wrong and what should be left to one’s free decision and desire for caution.

Your conscience must be ruled by God’s Word regardless of how many vaccines you’ve received or masks you wear. If we were facing a future in which the government would require everyone not to be vaccinated and never to wear a medical mask in public, then I would say the same thing. If we were facing a future in which churches were requiring people to leave if they had been vaccinated or were wearing a medical mask, I would say the same thing. That’s not a likely future, so I say this instead: the unvaccinated, too, can be saved. They may come into the church of God. They may receive the Word and the Supper of Christ. Our churches are open to the vaccinated and to the unvaccinated.

We cannot have churches where all must be vaccinated or unvaccinated or all masked or unmasked because we cannot have churches where whatever we heard this week or whatever we see coming down the pike rules our churches. If we are subject to diktats, pronouncements, scare tactics, and mandates promulgated without constitutional justification and then subject one another forcibly to them, we have forfeited the rule of God’s Word and given over the church to men. We will then have become the world’s plaything, subject not to every wind of doctrine but to every wind of push notifications on our phones.

The throngs in church—vaccinated or not, masked or not, believing the news they just saw or not—will not answer on the Last Day to Fox News or MSNBC, nor will they give account for the deeds they have carried out in this life to the talking heads they spent so much time watching. They will answer to Christ who to touched lepers with His hands and who overcame the greatest fear of so many – death itself. If we must meet such a mighty King then, how can we heed anything more than His Word now? All other kings and nations with their plotting and futile grasping at power will be put down from their thrones, abased and ashamed in their lies and futility. Then all flesh shall see the token that His Word is never broken, just as we sing. The Savior shall take the power and glory that was always His, and only His Word shall be the last word.