THE BOOK OF CONCORD – ITS ABIDING RELEVACE

Bruce Wilmot Adams.

Is truth just a matter of speculation? Is there anything relevant to life to verify that it has meaning? In this third millennium, the Lutheran Christian is living in a world dispirited by political disillusionment, the utopian folly of secular humanism, and an increasing uncertainty as to the future of the human race. A distrust of any abiding and final truth would seem to be edging civilization towards a new night of nihilism. Many young people are tragically choosing to opt out of life; especially in societies driven frantically by consumerism and affluence.

Despite the repeated failures of political ‘promises’, the media interest in the western world continues to be largely dominated by relativism, hedonism, and the promotion of postmodern political agendas. Every frequent election result is at first hailed with glee, only to be subsequently berated. The current scene would suggest that the relevance of the Christian creed is beyond the concern, even the interest of a majority of those without and even within the church. Yet there endures a strange contradiction. A form of spiritualism continues to find expression in yoga, or crystal balls even among those claiming to be educated. Stranger still,, among our contemporaries there appears to be a willingness to trust the fictitious claims of the “Da Vinci Code”, in preference to the historicity of the Scriptures.

Amidst this heavy secular ‘atmosphere’ the Lutheran confessor must never be daunted. The command of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ has never been revoked: “So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven.” (Matt.10:32 – ESV.) Therefore, it behoves all bishops, pastors, and faithful members of Lutheran churches in this year of grace, to abide as did the first Christians, devoted “to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts: 2:42-ESV.) About four hundred and thirty years ago the lion-hearted Fathers and Doctors of Concord, unashamedly confessed the biblical, apostolic and catholic counsel of God, amidst a church with a flawed theology and enticed by the militant renaissance philosophy to deify man. Let the confessors speak! “Therefore, in the presence of God and all Christendom among both our contemporaries and our posterity, we wish to have testified that the present explanation of all the foregoing controverted articles here explained, and none other, is our teaching, belief and confession in which by God’s grace we shall appear with intrepid hearts before the judgment seat of Jesus Christ and for which we shall give an account.” ¹

As God’s truth continues to be relevant for every age, so should the Incarnate Truth for believers take wings to fashion our lives in accord with the Confession of the Faith, grounded in God’s infallible and eternal Word. St. John’s apostolic warning still holds fast that, “Everone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God.” (2 John 9- ESV.)

In three respects The Book of Concord is relevant for our age.

First, it points us to the transcendence and authority of Holy Scripture.

When a generation loses, or rejects its understanding of God’s revelation as reflected in this postmodern era, it becomes increasingly subject to fragmentation and the promotion of violence, duly forewarned by the Lutheran scholar, Gene Edward Veith: “Today’s mass culture is similarly enthralled and titillated by violence. For the most part, this is an aestheticized violence, a vicarious thrill from a movie or rock concert. While it as yet has no specific focus or political outlook, there can be little doubt that the violence celebrated by the media is spilling over into reality, with the increases of bizarre criminality and horrific street violence.” ² Hence nothing remains sacred – not even human life!

In our pluralistic society evidence abounds that manipulators in the name of syncretism are determined to control the media and the masses in the honoured name of enlightenment and ‘tolerance’. Meanwhile, a generation lives (even appears to thrive) on a crisis to crisis predicament of seeking, yet never finding; searching but never discovering God’s revealed will and truth. John Carroll pertinently writes: “Man is locked up in himself, locked in subjectivity, in dread yearning for the only escape, revelation.” ³

Though the philosophy of death licks the thinking of contemporary men and women, the Book of Concord guides all who read and digest, to a vital view of Scripture and its abiding message of eternal life, salvation and hope. For the confessors who wrote and signed The Book of Concord, the sixty-six books of the Bible were never reduced to being the product of the editing and thought-forms evolving from minds in Israel and the primitive church. The Book of Concord, be it noted, uses the terms “the Word of God” and “Holy Scriptures” interchangeably. And because Scripture is God’s inspired Word, God-breathed (2 Tim.3:16), then God’s living Word “remains the sole rule and norm of all doctrine”⁴

The fact must always be born in mind that our Lord Jesus Christ accepted the absolute authority of the Old Testament and regularly quoted it as truth which cannot be broken (John 17:17); The same Holy Spirit inspired the apostles as witnesses of the Resurrection as well as the holy evangelists who together wrote the epistles and gospels of the New Testament between A.D. 48 and 90. In effect, it follows that Lutheran pastors and members are duly pledged to accept Scripture as their authority in all matters pertaining to faith and life. Little wonder that Luther burst out: “They {the Scriptures} will not lie to you.” ⁵ For Word/Alone members the Bible continues to be, “the pure, infallible and unalterable Word of God.” ⁶

This high view of Scripture so apparent throughout the Book of Concord in turn directs Christian thinking, the choices we make, and the doctrinal decisions affecting the life of the church.. Above all, it leads as by a line, to quote William Tyndale, to that Saviour of the world whom we implicitly trust for salvation and in whom we rest our hope for each day and eternity. Let our Lutheran churches of the true ‘apostolic succession’ shout aloud: “Sola Scriptura”.

Second,.It determines the content of the doctrine we proclaim and confess.

What is becoming obvious is the quickening decline of those churches which have embraced syncretism, a broad ecumenicity, a religious agnosticism, while pontificating on political issues. The sequel? They have made themselves culturally irrelevant.

What must be faced is the fact that where there is truth there is also error. St. Paul was particularly conscious of this in his epistle to the Galatians: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different Gospel – not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ” (Gal.1:6,7-ESV.) Without ever wavering the devil contrives to lull the church into an after-lunch nap, when concern for the distinct message of the Gospel becomes lip-service. In its place there thrives entertainment worship, void of reverent prayer, preaching non-centred in the Cross and estranged from the Holy Sacraments. What counts is what people appear to want.

Lutherans who confess the Faith embodied in the Book of Concord must learn again that satan retreats when his lies are exposed and his illusions exposed as deceptions. To reduce the Biblical faith to the lowest common denominator to appease secular society is what C.S.Lewis once described as “the minimal religion.” ⁷ Fact and fiction, right and wrong, sight and blindness can never be mixed into a vague plum pudding expression of religion, daring to entitle itself Christianity. The Book of Concord acts as a corrective as well as an effective antidote to those who would have us believe that religious eclecticism is commendable. The Preface of Concord refers to the First Epistle of St. John: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.” (1 John 4:1-ESV.),

In his timeless book, “Here We Stand” the late Hermann Sasse writes: “Those men of the Age of Orthodoxy excelled our age in at least one respect. They knew one thing which modern man does not know, and doers not care to know. They knew that as individuals and as nations, we literally live by truth, and literally die by falsehood… Their quest after truth, their struggling for the truth, was conditioned, moreover, by the conviction that there is One who is the Truth in person, One who said to truth-seekers of all ages, ’Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice’ ((John 18:37) “ ⁸ As to the legacy so essential to the Faith which Luther left behind by which the church stands or falls, let Sasse spell it out in his own inimitable way: “The legacy which Luther left behind can be properly grasped only by one who realizes that this legacy applies to all Christendom on earth. For if Luther –as he himself thought and the Evangelical Church believes –with his discovery of the saving truth of the justification of the sinner through faith alone, did nothing other than bring the holy Gospel to light again, then his discovery has a significance as universal as the Gospel itself.” ⁹ Luther was quite explicit in his Commentary on Galatians: “For if the doctrine of justification is lost, the whole of Christian doctrine is lost” ¹⁰

Nowhere is this article taught so lucidly as in Article IV, and the Apology of the Augsburg Confession. As Luther during his life and the lifetime of his fellow confessors confronted the Enthusiasts, as personified in the Anabaptists and Sacramentarians, so Lutherans are not presently immune from the same pressures in the twenty-first century. Just as Enthusiasm is embedded in every son of Adam, so it continues to break out in many guises such as some expressions of pentecostalism, the social gospel, the multitude of religious options, or in the visions of an institutional church subservient to a charismatic leader. For enthusiasts past and present, experience finally becomes their authority. The Word of God and the grace of God through the Sacraments are side-lined. How relevantly the Smalcald Articles address this issue: “In these matters, which concern the external, spoken Word, we must hold firmly to the conviction that God gives no one his Spirit or grace except through or with the external Word which comes before.” ¹¹ “We hold that the bread and the wine in the Supper are the true body and blood of Christ and that they are given and received not only by godly but also by wicked Christians” ¹²

The Apology of AC XXIV elucidates that the Word and the Sacraments are proclaimed and administered within the framework of the historic liturgy, or Mass. In the Confessions there can be found no sanction whatever for either entertainment, or pop worship. The ancient dictum of Prosper of Aquitane still applies, “Lex orandi est lex credenti et agenda” – the rule of prayer is the rule of belief and of action in the Church.” How heartening it is that the WordAlone Reclaim Resources is preparing a Liturgy and Hymnal faithful to

Confessional Lutheranism!.

To study the Confessions enables all serious readers to come to grips with doctrinal clarity, sharpening the mind to detect what is of God and what is of Satan. For Christians, this world remains a battlefield. (Ephes.6:10ff.)

Third, It proclaims Jesus Christ, as true God and as true Man.

Incomparable is Luther’s Answer to the meaning of The Second Article:

“I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, delivered me and freed from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with silver and gold but with his holy and precious blood and with his innocent sufferings and death, in order that I may be his, live under him in his kingdom, and serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence and blessedness, even as he is risen from the dead and lives and reigns to all eternity. This is most certainly true.”

(Small Catechism)

Who is Jesus Christ? That is a must-question for every living person. Throughout the Book of Concord the Scriptural teaching as to the Person of Jesus Christ is enunciated not only with precision, but also with rare beauty. Luther instructs us to see Christ from Genesis to Revelation.. Without hesitation the Confession contains the priceless ‘portrait’ of God incarnate, divine and human, each retaining their distinctive properties. While true Man, yet Jesus, our brother, in him” the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” (Coloss. 2:9) Article III of the Augsburg Confession makes for essential reading (pp.29-30) Such a confession of faith in the Nature of the Son of God should be the theme of every sermon.

So, why did Jesus come? The answer rings out loud and clear. He came, that He might die for us on Calvary’s Cross; suffer God’s holy wrath against sin for us, as our substitute, Saviour and Lord. The ‘theologia crucis’ must always take a central place within the framework of all Lutheran theology, so making it distinctive. Though spurious theolgies waffle on about a ‘superstar’ Jesus, or a socialist icon, the Book of Concord reminds us that our salvation does not rest upon our dubious good works, but upon “the sufferings and blood of the innocent Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”¹³ Ever since the Eighth Century the Agnes Dei has been chanted during the Service of the Eucharist.

What greater relevance can our Lutheran Confessional heritage have in today’s fragmented and despairing society, than to hold aloft afresh our Lord and Saviour; with Christians equipped to make an impregnable confession and living out a vigorous purpose-filled life in Christ to the glory of God! Surely the Book of Concord claims our study, obedience, and steadfast adherence, that all who call themselves Christians, especially confessional Lutherans, might show forth God’s saving grace in “the beauty of holiness”.

Herein lies the wonder of wonders! The serious student of the Book of Concord will discover for himself/herself the true affirmation of the ancient, apostolic, catholic and evangelical faith “once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 3 – ESV.)

After reading a sermon by the late Bishop Michael C.D. McDaniel, the contents immediately impacted upon the mind of this writer. Often I re-read it. Included are these engaging words: “To all who want to be faithful to their Lutheran heritage: ‘Take heart!’ Our resources are rich, indeed for discerning the Word and remaining steadfast in it To help us understand, we have the precious gift of our Book of Concord; to help us remain steadfast, we have the incomparable gift of prayer…I commend to you a systematic re-examination of this confessional heritage-especially the Formula of Concord, of which so many of us are woefully ignorant.” ¹⁴.

SOLI DEO GLORIA

Bruce Wilmot Adams,

Pastor Emeritus,

Lutheran Church of Australia,

Glengowrie, South Australia.

END-NOTES

1 The Book Of Concord,.trans.& edit by Theodore G. Tappert, Muhlenberg Press, 1959, p.636

2 .Gene E. Veith, “Modern Fascism”, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, 1993, p.182

3 .John Carroll, “Humanism-The Wreck of Western Culture”, Fontana Press, An Imprint of Harper Collins, Publishers, London, 1993,p.159

4. The Book of Concord,op.cit.p.505.

5. Ibid. p.455.

6. Ibid. p.8

7. C.S.Lewis, “God In The Dock”, William E. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, Michigan, 1970, p.139.

8. Hermann Sasse, “Here We Stand”, Lutheran Publishing House, Adelaide, South Australia, p.97.

9. Hermann Sasse, “The Lonely Way”, Vol.2, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, 2002, pp.172,173.

10. “Luther’s Works”, Vol.26 – “Lectures on Galatians”,1535, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, p.9.

11. The Book Of Concord, op.cit. p.312.

12. Ibid. p.311.

13. Ibid. p.309.

14. Michael C.D.McDaniel, “Steadfast in the Word of God” – “Lutheran Forum”, Christmass Winter 2000, A.L.P.B., Delhi, New York. pp.34,35.”