Aphorisms on Church and Office, Old and New
The debt which confessional Lutherans owe to Dr. John R. Stephenson just continues to climb. There is, first of all, his absolutely stunning work Eschatology in the Confessional Dogmatics series, the finest treatment of the topic that I have ever encountered. And as if that were not enough, he brought us great joy with The Lord’s Supper in the same series. This is, of course, to say nothing of his various articles and essays (the latest of which I recall is a delightful piece To Anaphorize or Not to Anaphorize, That is the Question in the festschrift in honor of Dr. Jonathan Naumann titled With Angels and Archangels). But now Dr. Stephenson has blessed us, particularly we Missourians, even more with a modest update to his earlier translation of Loehe’s Aphorisms of 1849 but now including also Church and Office: New Aphorisms, from 1851 with its three appendices. The title of the whole, published by Concordia Lutheran Theological Seminary, St. Catharines (2022) is thus fittingly: Aphorisms on Church and Office Old and New, and it is a must read.
If you’ve ever listened in on half a conversation on a phone call, you know that you can sometimes get a glimmering of the subject, but without the second half of the conversation you really are wont to misunderstand even what you clearly heard. That strikes me as the position of we Missourians regarding Wilhelm Loehe. We know the man mostly from what Walther found objectionable in him. But this is to not to know him at all! Dr. Stephenson does us the favor of allowing us to hear and discover Loehe in his own context. He simply lets Loehe speak for himself (though with helpful footnotes along the way!).
What stood out to me was that Loehe was not dogmatically stating “this is the way things are to be”, but as a Biblical theologian he sought to mine the Scriptures for their content on the topic of Church and Office, and to propose a way to sort out that rich and at times confusing data in a manner that was faithful to the Scriptures themselves, consistent with the Lutheran Symbols, and harmonious with the lived experience of the Church. The whole work has about it the context of “the mutual conversation and consolation of brothers.” SA III, III:4
And as it is a fraternal discussion about these important matters that Loehe is seeking to further, his own humility is clear as he listens to the criticism his 1849 work has received and reconsiders what he wrote in light of his critics’ concerns in the later work of 1851. You can see this, for instance, on p. 118, footnote 1, where he is willing to walk back some of the conclusions he made in the earlier work about the office of evangelist. But while there are concerns raised that he concedes; on any number of others, he firmly believes he got right the first time round and he isn’t shy about that, if he can show where the doctrine derived from the Scriptures. And that is simply what shines through everything that he writes: this man has wholly submitted himself to the authority of the Word of God without reservation. His approach is thus both refreshing and inspiring, something we do well to emulate. And I hasten to add that his commitment to the Symbols under that Word is exemplary as well.
Now, the book is not without its zingers. My favorites occur in the first half: “In general the Lutheran teachers find themselves with respect to ordination in an embarrassment of their own making,” p. 51. Ha! Truer words never spoken! And more specifically: “We shall indeed have to concede that ordination is more and counts for more than is customarily assumed, that it gives competence and authorisation for the exercise of office in a more universal way, that a charisma, a grace and gift of office comes through it, that the statement sine titulo ne quis ordinetur (‘no one shall be ordained without having found a particular sphere of activity’) must be interpreted thus: ‘No one shall receive the universal authorisation and gift of the office before he can use it somewhere’, p. 51. Is he wrong here? I think not.
Throughout the book, Loehe (submitted as he is to the authority of the divine Word) holds fast to presbyteral ordination as the very grounds upon which any “succession” operates, and the very notion of succession he argues is not simply something to be dismissed out of hand (p. 50). Still, he is careful to treat the matter within the parameters of the Symbols. An example of his sorting of the Biblical data is his assigning of Timothy and Titus to the category of “evangelists” (remembering 2 Timothy 4:5). He understand this particular office as special assistants to the Apostles, fulfilling the ministry that would later to fall to bishops, in dealing with whole territories rather than single congregations. And he deliciously notes how Timothy then received this equivalent to the later bishop’s office by the laying on hands of the presbytery! (1 Timothy 4:14). A bishop ordained by a bunch of presbyters; fancy that!
If his notion of the presbytery perpetuating itself makes a Missourian slightly nervous, in part 2 he clarifies in a way that alleviates the angst. In the section Congregation from Office? Office from Congregation?, Loehe wisely observes: “Now no one doubts that the congregation is born from the Word and that the Word has power among those who speak it in the office and among those who speak it without the office. God stands by His Word, let it come through whom it will” p. 127. He does an outstanding job of distinguishing the royal priesthood and its sacrifice of self-oblation from the office of preaching the Gospel and administering the sacraments (ah, did dear Dr. Nagel learn this from Loehe?). Loehe’s section on the problematic portions of Luther’s early writings is especially worth pondering. For there is no doubt that Luther seems at times to confound the two (I wish he’d dealt specifically with Luther’s sermons in the Church Postil for Quasimodogeniti). Loehe’s answer to this was wisely: consider Luther’s context. He argues the same when he deals with Tractatus 69: “I was always eager to be convinced by a different opinion, but each time I re-read them I came to the same conclusion, so that the passages that seemed most contradictory no longer appeared to be so if I weighed the context, the polemical purpose, the emergency situation, and what the next paragraph speaks about” p. 133.
This could go on much longer, because truly gems tumble out on nearly every page. So let me wrap up with a huge thank you to Dr. Stephenson for translating this delightful bit of Loehe for us so we could fairly hear the voice on the other side of the transatlantic phone line; thank you to Dr. Winger and St. Catharines for publishing it; and you, dear reader? Click here and BUY IT. You will not regret it!
