What Can Evangelical Catholic Lutherans Offer to Today’s Wandering Souls?
by R. David Nelson [editor]
In my last editorial, I offered a pathology of the malaise that seems to be afflicting evangelical catholic Lutheran witness, using the refrain “times have changed” to suggest that we evangelical catholics need to do a better job of advertising our vision for Lutheran faith and practice in this present milieu. The editorial was, I readily admit, something of a downer. Devoted to the task of diagnosing an ailing patient, I spent most of my time tracing the apparent deflation of our vision against the backdrop of two broader changes which have taken place in recent years; namely, the shift in internecine conflicts among Lutherans in North America from hot war to stalemate, and the transition of the modern ecumenical movement from a period of “revolutionary ecumenism” to a new era of “normal ecumenism.” Several readers opined that I was too grumpy and gloomy in the piece, and urged me that things are not as bad as I made them out to be. A few folks advised me to turn my attention to those small pockets of North American Lutheran life wherein evangelical catholicism appears (to them, at least) to be thriving. One letter writer even complained that I had unleashed a jeremiad upon unsuspecting Lutheran Forum readers still acclimating themselves to my editorial style. Perhaps.
In any case, just as Law rightly precedes Gospel in Christian proclamation, and since, as a rule, it helps to get the bad news out of the way first, I’ll stand by last issue’s editorializing as a preamble to the following remarks, which are, on full measure, neither as grumpy nor as gloomy as what I asserted before. We evangelical catholics just are in a predicament that is generational in character. No matter how we got ourselves into this mess, though, what is most important is that we find a way forward. As Churchill reportedly said (though he probably didn’t): If you’re going through hell, keep going. Rather than rehashing my remarks on the hell we’re in, let me offers some thoughts, such as they are, on how we might move ahead.
Our Banner—The Harmony of “evangelical” and “catholic”
In the fall issue, I offered a thumbnail sketch of the evangelical catholicism Lutheran Forum has embodied and promoted from the very start. Our mandate, as I put it there, is to facilitate a vision of Lutheran Christianity that is rooted in the Nicene tradition and in the Lutheran confessions, committed to the tough work of ecumenical dialogue and cooperation, and eager to face the day’s challenges responsibly, critically, and evangelically. To boil it down to the essential terms, in doing so stripping away surface materials to reveal the basic architecture, we devote ourselves to a brand of Lutheranism that is, at once, evangelical and catholic.
In an article from 1949, the great Danish Lutheran theologian and ecumenist, Regin Prenter, argues that the evangelical and catholic tendencies or emphases flourishing in historic Christianity are “not mutually exclusive,” but rather “complementary, when they are interpreted in the light of the fundamental principle expressed in each of them.”[1] While Prenter goes on to elaborate this claim by focusing on ecumenical developments between Protestants and Roman Catholics in the first half of the twentieth century, his comments are helpful for understanding what evangelical catholic Lutheranism seeks to harmonize. “The true God and the true relation of man to God,” he explains, lending his voice to what he identifies as the evangelical tendency, “are present nowhere but in the living Word of the sovereign God coming to man and taking possession of him in the act of faith.” At the same time, and as the catholic tendency has it: “In the historic Church and its institutions God has once for all made His redeeming power accessible to man. In His grace He has not left it to man himself to seek for salvation where he might choose to do so; He has given His saving grace through specially appointed persons and at specially appointed times and places.”[2]
Prenter proceeds in the piece to express a quintessentially Lutheran description of the evangelical tendency, where the one Word of God is the gospel of the incarnate, crucified, and resurrected Jesus Christ preached as the crisis of the law and the law’s works. While his summary of the catholic impulse focuses on office and institutional spaces, at the heart of his commentary is an expansive understanding of tradition as a deposit of visible signs of the one Word passed along from generation to generation. One is reminded here of Yves Congar’s succinct claim that tradition is “the communication of the entire heritage of the apostles” down through the ages.[3] In a similar vein, in Prenter’s reading, Christianity’s catholic tendency embraces the idea that the Word is transmitted through time in the church’s teachings, liturgies, practices, ministries, and institutional forms.
We might hem and haw about particular aspects of Prenter’s definitions. But his point in the article, again, is that these two tendencies—the evangelical and the catholic—need not be pitted against each other. He turns to Luther, albeit briefly, as an exemplar of how to embrace and embody both of these tendencies at once. After all, Prenter reminds us, Luther argued against the enthusiasts and spritualists of his day that we encounter the Word and the Spirit never apart from, but indeed through external signs: “in the manger, on the Cross, in the exterior word, in the sacrament, in the Church.”[4] When we seek only the inner Word, or seek the Word only inwardly—which, for Prenter, is precisely what happens when the evangelical impulse gets unmoored from Christianity’s catholic essence—our piety “denigrates into subjectivist spiritualism.”[5]
I cite Prenter at length here because his comments neatly epitomize the substance of the evangelical catholicism many of us continue to find so bracing and meaningful. With Prenter, we consider Luther, in his best moments, to be a model of the integration of Christianity’s evangelical and catholic emphases. And, likewise with Prenter, we maintain that a properly evangelical catholic understanding of Christian faith and practice has much to offer churchgoers who today find themselves pulled in one direction or the other.
An Opportunity—Modern Pilgrims and the Quest for the Word’s External Signs
Given the very real generational and transmissional challenges I highlighted in my last editorial, the question arises whether we have any reason to hope that evangelical catholicism might find sturdy footing among emerging Christians. For the sake of our ongoing consideration of the future of evangelical catholicism here at Lutheran Forum, let me briefly highlight one trend in contemporary North American Christianity that may present us with a genuine opportunity.
In her remarkable book, Searching for Sunday, late author Rachel Held Evans recounts her pilgrimage away from the breezy evangelical church culture of her adolescence and youth and toward a brand of worship rooted in Christianity’s liturgical traditions.[6] We need not agree with every aspect of Evans’s theology and politics to appreciate the potency of her account, for hers is a journey that has become commonplace among North American Christians of her generation. College students, young singles, and young married couples are leaving the evangelical megachurches in droves, and not all of them to join the “nones,” that ambiguous category embracing both Christians who no longer choose to identify with particular denominations and institutions, and post-Christian individuals who no longer choose to identify as Christian at all. Indeed, Evans and many others have discovered another, very different pathway leading out of the wastelands of fundamentalism and megachurch evangelicalism, a pathway that takes the pilgrim back through the doors of the church to find meaning and authenticity in liturgies, sacraments, and other traditional practices.
We can squabble about theological commitments at another time. For now, let me simply suggest that the contemporary discovery of liturgy and tradition by emerging Christians offers us an occasion to rearticulate our vision of the faith as evangelical and catholic. Young evangelicals are heeding the call that “we must love and care for the (church’s) material culture, for those things that make present the beautiful, haunting world of the living God,” as Robert Louis Wilken has recently and memorably put it.[7] “When my faith had become little more than an abstraction, a set of propositions to be affirmed or denied,” Evans remarks in a similar vein, “the tangible, tactile nature of the sacraments invited me to touch, smell, taste, hear, and see God in the stuff of everyday life again.”[8]
This present moment in North American Christianity must compel us to open up the doors of our churches, inviting sojourners from the fading heyday of evangelical subculture to touch, smell, taste, hear, and see God in the signs we cherish as marks of God’s presence among us. We maintain, of course, that a revival of interest in such signs is no substitute for receiving and submitting to the Word of God. On the contrary, and returning to Prenter’s witness to the intertwining of the faith’s evangelical and catholic tendencies, we hold that the Word of God addresses us just through external signs; in particular, through preaching and the sacraments. If we can convincingly show that such a vision of evangelical catholic Lutheranism offers a refuge, a home, for emerging Christians disenchanted with the illusory, sentimental, and deadly boring brand of the faith hawked by today’s enthusiasts and spiritualists, we just might manage to pass along what we ourselves have received.
Our Tasks—Hint: It’s the Stuff We Ought to Be Doing Anyway
So what—concretely!—to do? There was a time in the history of North American Christianity when pressing challenges and opportunities such as those before us now would lead to the proliferation of new think tanks, councils, journals, conferences, religious societies, and even denominations. Many of us affiliate with institutions formed to address some urgent need or another. One might even succeed in tracing the entire history of inter-Lutheran hostilities during the past four decades by mapping out the entities and events originating in this or that crisis. These days, our activism tends to take shape in symbolic forms, too, as it is typical for us to declare our allegiances and protest the alternatives through Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter hashtags.
My hunch is that the challenges and opportunities facing us today demand to be met by more prosaic measures. We advertise an evangelical catholic vision for Lutheran faith and practice primarily by putting that vision to good and energetic use. At the risk of sounding drastically rudimentary, let me briefly highlight four basic things we ought to be doing anyway in our congregations, but nevertheless must do now with urgency if we wish to see evangelical catholic Lutheran witness flourish among emerging Christians. These practices, I submit, epitomize the core of any strategy we might draft for moving ahead through our generational predicament.
Preach. Astonishing things happen when we dare preach Scripture in the context of Christian worship; namely, those gathered hear the Word of God and respond to its call. In preaching, the Word devastates and accuses and condemns, and awakens and enlivens and gathers. Law and gospel. The movement is baptismal in its basic structure and corresponds to the shape of the Christian life. Preaching shakes the hearer from the foundations up, and opens a vista upon the mystery of the divine will.
I am convinced that our success in passing along our vision of Lutheran faith and practice depends upon the quality of our preaching. Folks drift through our doors each Sunday hungry to receive the life-changing Word, preached in its authenticity. We must devote ourselves, therefore, to the basics of weekly sermon prep—exegesis of the texts, immersion in the church’s commentary tradition, prayer and meditation, the careful differentiation of law and gospel, the crafting of the message, and so on.
There is one more urgent thing to be said here. The sermon, as an act of public proclamation, is a unique event in which the Word sounds forth and does its work. By virtue of its public setting and character, preaching is a necessarily political act. Political commentary, however, is no substitute for the exposition and proclamation of Scripture according to the distinction of law and gospel. Some have suggested—and, for what it’s worth, I would agree with them—that we currently face an unprecedented emergency in our national politics. But the sermon is not the occasion to float an op-ed piece. We are called to preach, not to convince those gathered—and ourselves!—that the Lectionary texts are really only about what’s in the news.
Celebrate. You’ll recall from the quote, above, that Evans’s pilgrimage to tradition and liturgy pivots on her discovery of the ‘tangible, tactile nature of the sacraments.’ She goes on in the same paragraph to recount that the sacraments “reminded me that Christianity…is meant to be lived, shared, spoken, and enacted in the presence of other people.”[9]
In our best moments—indeed, whenever we devote ourselves to rightly administrating the sacraments, as CA VII puts it—our tradition stresses that God is really present to us, and we are really present to and at one with each other, in the celebration of sacraments. Baptism, we hold, initiates our journey toward the eschatological banquet, a foretaste of which we receive every time we partake of the Lord’s Supper together. Both events, moreover, are visible, enacted signs of the church’s essential apostolicity and catholicity. Mysteriously and sublimely, the entire Church, the whole body of Christ, is present together with us as we participate in these celebrations.
Folks drift through our doors each Sunday searching for a story that transcends their own. They are yearning, too, for real communion—to know and to be known. We are drawn into such mysteries whenever we gather around the font and the altar. Let us, then, administer these celebrations rightly!
Catechize. In his preface to the Large Catechism from 1530, Luther calls out the “louts and skinflints” among the nobility who, thinking they can master Christian truth and piety on their own, read the catechism once, and then “toss the book into a corner as if they are ashamed to read it again.” Over against such displays of abject indifference to the church’s teachings, Luther recommends that Christians revisit the catechism daily. “I cannot master it as I wish,” he writes of his own daily practice of study and reflection, “but must remain a child and pupil of the catechism.”[10]
Sadly, in many of our churches catechesis has been reduced to a rather painful rite of passage we must endure during our adolescent years. Once we complete the ‘program’ and receive our gift Bible, we set aside catechesis as an accomplished task and move on to supposedly more mature phases of Christian education. Luther reminds us, however, that we are always children and students of the catechism, and that catechesis is the lifelong, daily duty and delight of the Christian.
I wonder what would happen if we embraced Luther’s vision of catechesis in our churches and in our homes. Anecdotal evidence suggests that adrift evangelicals are not looking for doctrines and teachings when they wander through our doors. On the contrary, they are likely to be fleeing from what they perceive as stodgy and inflexible dogmatism. Perhaps, though, they have never encountered the flourishing of doctrine and teaching in the church, fueled by daily, dutiful, and delighted devotion to the catechism. We’d do well, for our own sakes and for theirs, to pay heed to Luther’s wise counsel.
Pray. Many years ago, I was acquainted with a pastor who prayed every day that the Holy Spirit would stir up a revival in his congregation. I don’t know if one ever materialized; heck, I’m not even quite sure I know what the pastor meant by ‘revival.’ Looking back, though, I am struck by the fact that this man was so committed to the idea that his congregation needed reviving that he prayed daily for God to intervene.
It seems to me that ‘concerned’ Lutherans of all stripes have done quite a lot of talking during our half-century of infighting and stalemate. We are quick to pontificate on our own positions, and eager to condemn our perceived enemies. We have produced heaps of publications analyzing whatever happens to be troubling us, drawing from sources classical and modern to offer solutions. All of that is well and good. Indeed, we at Lutheran Forum pledge to continue to publish our brand of provocations and, whenever appropriate, pontifications. But I sincerely wonder how many of us have devoted ourselves to praying for the winds of change to blow. The future is in God’s hands, not ours. Let us recognize this and implore God to act.
Notes
[1] Regin Prenter, “Catholic and Evangelical: A Lutheran View,” in Ecumenical Review 1 no. 4 (1949): 384. Prenter wrote the article in the months following the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches, which had taken place in Amsterdam in August and September, 1948. The article is a response to the Assembly’s discussion of a deeply-rooted ecumenical dissensus, as Prenter puts it, concerning different emphases “on the one hand, on the initiative of the sovereign Word of God, and, on the other, the visible continuity of ecclesiastical institutions. The first emphasis is commonly regarded as predominant in Protestantism, the second in Catholicism” (382).
[2] Ibid, 383-384.
[3] Yves Congar, The Meaning of Tradition, trans. A.N. Woodrow (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 22.
[4] Prenter, “Catholic and Evangelical,” 386.
[5] Ibid., 385.
[6] Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2015).
[7] Robert Louis Wilken, “An Affair of Things,” First Things no. 300 (February, 2020): 10.
[8] Evans, Searching for Sunday, xvi.
[9] Ibid.
[10] “The Large [German] Catechism of Dr. Martin Luther—Martin Luther’s Preface,” in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, eds. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 380.
