One Holy Contextual and Apostolic Church?

The above illustration is from the 2022 Northwest District convention of the LCMS.

To put the best construction on this, its context must be presented as an ironic misunderstanding that many people have regarding our Lutheran confession of faith: that it is provincial, it is for rubes in flyover country, and it must be altered to fit a more sophisticated, progressive culture as found on the coasts.

And indeed, a lot of people think this way about the LCMS and about our Lutheran tradition. We advocates of the Divine Service (Gottesdienst) hear it all the time: “The Liturgy is German,” “Minorities need a different context for worship,” “The LCMS is ‘too white,’” and on and on. Indeed, “contextualization” is a buzzword among our “missional” faction in the LCMS that pits outreach against solid theology and worship. Our “contextualizers” are our own version of the secular world’s race-conscious and gender-ideology advocates of identity politics.

Our friends in the ELCA love to bandy about the term “contextualization” - especially in matters of race-baiting and sexual deviancy. The late John Shelby Spong was at least honest when he posited that “Christianity must change or die.” And the Appeal to Context may be a new variation on the Appeal to Authority fallacy.

The word “context” appears eight times in some of our English translations of the Book of Concord - and all of those instances refer to hermeneutics of texts, not of adapting our confession to different cultures. And even then, the word “context” has been added by the English translators. The words Kontext and contextus do not seem to appear in the original texts of the Lutheran confessions at all.

The world relies on the subjective notion of “context” to shift from reading texts objectively and applying them universally, to a hermeneutic of mangling the texts to arrive at predetermined conclusions (a tactic that our Lutheran confessors accuse our adversaries of doing). It is a kind of “deconstructionism” that muddles the objective and the subjective - which is a brilliant Satanic tactic to do damage to the Doctrine of Justification and rob us of the Gospel, replacing the external focus on the cross with self-directed naval-gazing - often based on ethnicity or sexuality or geography.

The NWD is to be commended for bringing this diabolical sleight-of-hand to our attention.

For our Book of Concord rejects this notion that we are a “Midwestern Church” and must bend and distort itself to adapt to a “West Coast context” with its advocacy of debauchery and cultural degeneracy. The drama over the bogus now-former bishop in the ELCA, whose “context” involves made-up pronouns, is a case in point - as she was first “ordained” at Ebenezer Lutheran (sic) Church (sic) in San Francisco, whose feminist theological context results in the worship of a goddess instead of the Most Holy Trinity. The ensuing you-know-what show in that pseudo-ecclesiastical organization is a result of “contextualization” instead of simply believing our confessions that we are not a Midwestern Church and not a West Coast Church, that we are not a Church shifting its shape based upon ever-changing contexts, but rather we actual Lutherans are confessors of the one church (una sancta), the holy church, the catholic church, and the apostolic church.

Perhaps one area where we did allow identity politics to hold sway was in the removal of the word “catholic” from the Apostles and Nicene Creeds, replacing them with the weak 15th century euphemism “Christian” - since the transliterated word “katholisch” had not yet come into use in the German language. This is unfortunate, since the adjective “catholic” is our true and genuine “context.” We are neither a church built upon the sinking sands of either stereotype: the Midwestern Rube or the West Coast Flake. We confess a church that is not provincial, but universal.

And the word “catholic” carries much more freight than simply being “universal” - tying together the “context” of Lutherans around the world to include North Americans, Europeans, Africans, Asians, Indigenous peoples, Latin Americans, etc. Indeed, that is included, but not exhaustive of the context of being catholic Christians. The word “catholic” carries with it the wholeness and the wholesomeness of the faith and the church. The word “Christian” doesn’t bear the same meaning. In fact, proof that the two distinct words are not simple synonyms with one another is proven on page 319 of the LSB. See verse 19 in the Athanasian Creed, in which both “Christian” and “catholic” are used: the former as an adjective modifying the noun “truth,” and the latter as an adjective modifying the noun “religion.”

And as for the modern English concession of allowing the Papal Church to have the unqualified title of “Catholic” with uppercase letters, while we wring our hands with a “small c” and offering embarrassed explanations - let’s stop being pusillanimous and allowing our detractors to define us. The original creeds, both Greek and Latin, had no uppercase and lowercase distinction. The 1921 English translation of the Book of Concord - published by Concordia Publishing House (which is the Missouri Synod imprimatur) - includes the use of both lowercase and uppercase versions of the word “catholic” (which is used 18 times in the Book of Concord, if the creeds are included in the count).

Indeed, as Trinity Sunday approaches, I would encourage pastors to make use of this Creed in the Divine Service. In fact, if you recite the Creed responsively by verse, the congregation will get the last word:

This is the catholic faith; whoever does not believe it faithfully and firmly cannot be saved.

No doubt, some boomers will complain, but it will be good for them to confess this “Christian truth” of our “catholic religion” with their own lips. This is our true and genuine contextualization that transcends time and place and the smallness of provincial geography and culture, but rather locates us in the whole and wholesome universality of the faith that is not only evangelical, but orthodox and catholic.

Indeed, on February 23, 1537, the Rev. John Brentz signed the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope with a statement that is part of our Book of Concord. In it, Brentz refers to our confession not as a Saxon Church, a German Church, or as a European Church. Rather, he (and we) properly locate our context outside of culture and geography as “the true and genuine catholic Church (catholicae ecclesiae).

The NWD is to be commended for taking this on and giving us food for thought.