WHAT’S MISSING IN MISSION?

Stanwell Tops Synod in October will pick up a deep concern of the LCA: Mission. Missing in the Church is an effective unified thrust in mission for today. This doesn’t mean that our Church hasn’t had many examples of success in mission to celebrate. We have. Nor have we lacked in studies on mission and missiology. But, with a synod focus, the great hope, clearly, is that this emphasis will lead to congregations being inspired and motivated for mission. Is there perhaps a secret ‘spin-off’ hope—this will be something to help unify the Church?

My concern in what is written here is that we need urgently to deal with barriers to mission in the LCA which have received little or no preparatory attention. These barriers come in the form of what has developed as a church sub-culture, a condition which stifles mission endeavour in the church and can have a kind of B.O. aroma for any inquirer looking for a church home.

In short, have we taken a long hard look at ourselves with the question: Have we come to know how we stand before God within the cultural context in which he has placed us and all around us?

We recognise the power, peace and joy of the Gospel and the Holy Spirit at work “like the wind” leading people to faith in Christ Jesus. But mission is directed towards people and involving the witness of people caught up in the world of people as Jesus uses the term world. As a church, have we evaded the sensitive topic of human nature and human capacity in regard to mission: theological anthropology?

This question can only be dealt with adequately for the Church as it addresses the prevailing culture and so this becomes an on-going task for on-going insights and opportunities for repentance and for a freedom in joyful witness. Exposing the philosophy, which drives the culture, then also exposes any false hermeneutic. The Word of God itself is at stake and with it our relationship to Christ Jesus as Lord. It is here that we can rediscover the mission dynamic of the Reformation for our day. Naturally, the extent of this topic can only be touched on here, and I know that my attempt to deal with it is very inadequate.

As a Church we neglect Culture to our Peril

We can sense something of the way our LCA is restricted in mission when we see how much more writers of other denominations in Australia and beyond are alerting their people to the decadence of our western civilization. What is it that holds us back from saying simply, humbly, boldly what we believe in relation to the pagan ideologies and practices which our people, often in their brokenness, are waking up to every day? The homosexuality now being taught in a pilot project in state schools in S.A. is merely a symptom of a cultural condition by which we are all affected. We thank God for members who have written boldly on bio-ethical and other issues as also all those working to address social needs. But there is a whole cultural context that needs to be addressed.

Last century Hermann Sasse stressed an important principal for our Church. It was the need to discern where the philosophy underlying our culture is attacking the fundamental teachings of the Christian faith. From that position he could confess the wonder, greatness and glory of God’s saving work in Christ and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in the church. That insight for him was crucial and determined why he could be both respected and rejected, and that internationally and at home. There is good reason for us in the LCA to celebrate that his writings are being revisited and reprinted.

In 1967 when the LCA was on a high and in euphoria mode following union of the two former synods the previous year, Sasse provided for Christianity Today (Vol. 11, March 3) an article, Sin and Forgiveness in the Modern World. The insights are prophetic at a time when the postmodern revolution had just begun. After mention of earlier revolutions, Sasse continued:

. . .In whatever forms men may have interpreted it in religions, schools of wisdom, and philosophical and sociological systems, this phenomenon that the Bible calls the law written in all men’s hearts (Rom. 2:14,15) is their common possession. They all have thought in terms of right and wrong, good and evil, vice and virtue, keeping and breaking the law, justice, guilt, sin, judgement, punishment, satisfaction.

But it was the privilege of modern mankind—or, more accurately, of the modern, Western, “Christian” world—to deny and destroy these basic concepts of human life and thought. This was the great revolution that began in the neo-pagan Renaissance, developed in the philosophy of Enlightenment, and found its first visible manifestation when the French Revolution in 1789 started the series of modern revolutions that swept through Europe from west to east and began to spread through the entire world threatening not only old forms of life but all human life on earth. Not the violation of eternal laws (which has happened and will happen at all times) but the denial of the existence of such laws—this is at the heart of the great revolution that began in the quiet studies of writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche and showed its true face in the horrors of the French, German and Russian revolutions. It is this great revolution, the abolition of eternal laws that are binding on all men and all ages, that has destroyed the consciousness of sin and the understanding of forgiveness, even in the Christian churches(emphasis mine). History shows that the disintegration of a civilization, the decay of nations, the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the world in which the earthly Church lives, always are reflected in the life of the Church. This is naturally so, because the members of the Church live in the world and are as weak and sinful men exposed to all temptations of the world. . . .

Sasse foresaw in 1967 what then, in the postmodern era, spilled on to the streets and, through the media, into our family rooms more aggressively as the twentieth century continued—law and truth made relative to what people want them to be. To the best of my knowledge this article was never reprinted by our Church and made more accessible to its members. We were not ready for it. In reality, what happened was that Sasse’s voice was hushed, his influence ‘swept under the carpet’ and his credibility overshadowed by the more popular influence of Barth and Bonhoeffer.

Our Church was ill-prepared for the postmodern era because a confessional approach to contempory culture as such was beyond its general experience. There was still the pressing need to find acceptance as an Australian church open to the community, with the social baggage that involved.

What Sasse called “Not the violation of eternal laws . . . but the denial of the existence of such laws” was already a theological warning to the Church of a blatant denial of all objective truth and ethical direction given by God. Luther had written of “the law given by God first of all to restrain sins” and “to make original sin manifest and show man to what utter depths his nature has fallen” (Smalc. Art. 3.2.1,4). This would be meaningless to the postmodern mind and seriously attack the faith of our people.

We should have seen how much the red lights were flashing. The past few centuries in the West, which have seen amazing advances in so many fields, have also shown a growing decline in recognising God’s place in human life. Ideologically now God is shut out, and the rest of the world has been drawn into or has joined in the turmoil.

What has this to do with mission?

Everything—for us as a church! What Sasse did consistently was to analyse the driving forces in the culture in relation to the Word of God and the church—for us, its people. This exposed the human condition in a way that did more than only highlight particular evils like abuse of sex, abortion, etc. It showed where we all are vulnerable, whether believers or not. This is the scene where original sin (CA2) becomes clearer and where repentance takes on a deeper meaning. Here the believer can identify with unbelievers and empathise with them in humility. Here relationships in attitude can better be established, meeting others ‘where they are at’.

When the hymn Amazing grace can get to the top of the list of hits we have as clear an example as we need of mission which meets in the depths. And the Lutheran Reformation has provided us with a unique understanding of original sin in which to relate compassionately with unbelievers. They are the first to smell smugness, complacency, superiority, an insensitive or ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude in Christians. To what extent do we find this in an LCA sub-culture?

The LCA has rightly taken its theology seriously. However, when this theology does not expose the ego by addressing adequately the prevailing philosophy, it is avoiding a significant part of the theology of the cross. This involves both the cross of Christ and the cross of the Christian. The dangers that can result include the failure to relate ‘naturally’ and appropriately with others and reverently with God, and inviting a faulty theology—incursion of Schwaemerei. What this also means is taking more seriously the distinction between the world and God’s kingdom, between sight and faith, hopelessness and hope. Gene Veith has done the Lutheran Church a great service. He has done much to clarify for us in more simple terms how confessional Lutheran theology relates to philosophies that concern us (“Postmodern Times”). Could this study be felt as a threat?

Today we are seeing how much more fragile people are as narcissism increases. Individuals deify themselves (knowingly or unknowingly) to dictate their own truth and morals. The sinful human nature is cut loose from any natural law, and we have seen how quickly society crumbles. With narcissism all relationships with others are undermined: both relationships with other people and also relationship with God. The human cry of lostness and brokenness is a cry to the church. “Tell us who we are and what meaning there is in living. Don’t talk down to us, but talk to us where we are at!” We need to know the reason for all the underlying fears today so that we can relate to others sensitively and with empathy, i.e. with Christian love.

The whole of a recent ABC talk-back radio program consisted of listeners phoning in the songs they wanted played at their funeral. Amid the laughter and flippant talk that accompanied blasphemous songs, there was also a blind defiance. We are dealing with a culture of death and postmodern philosophy that has aimed at deconstructing human life.

Our Lutheran understanding of putting to death the old nature provides a reality with which to relate in conversation. That this attitude to death differs will soon be recognised, and this in itself invites comment or question. The opening for talk on the new life in Christ can come without human pressuring, a humble confession of faith when the opportunity comes. Non-judgmental relating need concede nothing of our faith. We need only to know that the joy and peace we have in “the wisdom of the cross” can bring rejection, shame and even suffering, but that’s one reason for which we are here (Col.1:24), and we can rejoice in the Lord and for his church.

Maturity in Self-examination for Mission

It is a sign of maturity in the church when it can carry out self-examination of both where it is now and where it has come from. We recognise that the faith and devotion of our forebears could often have been much greater than ours, but they too were tempted and prone to failings in spite of which the Lord of the church still carried on and passed on his mission to us.

In the modern era when human reason and intellect dominated, our previous two Synods were able to resist the pressures of liberal theology. There was a reverence for God’s Word and a fear of God that were strong. We thank God for that, and maybe the somewhat isolated situation of the two Churches at the time was a blessing. However, in nurturing and spiritual formation we did not do so well. Was there too often a human pressure and confidence in the intellect that overshadowed and hindered the Holy Spirit’s work in creating faith—‘jug to mug’ teaching (Roland Croucher)? Was the Spirit’s work of encouraging a personal sharing of God’s hand in our lives and being able to openly confess our convictions hindered? This would have meant going against the popular culture, but it could have helped our people to become more open in relating to others and speaking about their faith. There are human pressures in dogmatism and pietism that diminish love and freedom of conscience.

This raises important questions about the way our Church struggled with change in recent decades. Were many of our people, especially our youth, then more likely to go their own way when postmodern pressures for ‘heart-stuff’ burst in on our society? As for the church, many voted with their feet. Was this a reason why pressured consciences were left vulnerable and reacted to go along with excesses of postmodern behaviour? Have pastors and people reacted against the Confessions of the Lutheran Church because they have not seen them address the philosophies and ideologies of our culture? Without our Confessions addressing the ‘coal-face’ of the world opposed to God faith becomes static or stagnant, presumptuous or hypocritical. Has this also shown us, as a church, how vulnerable we can be in our theology—either to concede to change and social pressure that defies truth or to resist change and isolate truth from life? Questions such as these, it seems, need to be considered in order to understand where we as a church are coming from and where we are today. Our mission needs it.

Because culture is such a broad, complex and changing entity, we need to distinguish between what is God-given and what is human-driven, obedient to God’s will or opposed to it. There are aspects of culture that can be ‘converted’ to become vehicles for the Gospel, e.g. language, music and customs modified by Christian love. We have also seen much that is positive in changes postmodernism has led us to recognise.

But, for our present purposes in the LCA, there is an aspect of the Lutheran Reformation which provides vital direction for our present day, whether in cultural lag from the modern era or in the postmodern or whatever we are moving into as people react to what is happening now.

The insight we get from Luther is that human philosophies within the culture must be clearly exposed and seen in the light of God’s word. That done, then other questions of culture can be discerned in relation to God’s will: what can be used in service to the Gospel and what must be opposed. The LWF Nairobi Statement on Worship and Culture (1996) provides the helpful categories of Transcultural (beyond culture), Contextual (varied local situation), Counter-cultural (contrary to Scripture) and Cross-cultural. An urgent challenge for our Church is to see its mission to our youth and understand where they are coming from in the light of these features.

Mission and Confession belong together

Confession of the Christian faith must be counter-cultural in today’s world especially because it upholds truth in Christ as absolute and denies that this truth can be made relative to what fallen human nature wants to make it. We need therefore to expect opposition, resistance, ridicule, shame or even persecution in whatever form. How much are we recognising this in the LCA today?

In the Christian church, mission and confession belong together. For the apostles and the apostolic church, truth in Christ Jesus was there to be believed and to be confessed in mission. When Paul claimed to become all things to all people so that by all possible means he might save some (1 Cor. 9:22), he certainly had no intention to compromise the truth he confessed. It is the truth that is incisive, however simply it is told with the love that is shown.

We need to acknowledge the many different ways the Lord has carried out his mission in numerous cultures and through different churches over the centuries right to our present day.

However, there are distinctives about the Lutheran reformation which make it equally relevant for our mission today. It was a mission with the Gospel which brought 8,118 theologians, ministers and teachers to sign the Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord and then convert this into pastoral care for a mission subsequently also into many other cultures.

Luther provided a direction for mission that is totally appropriate for the present era, as in fact it is for any era. Mission is the course of God’s word being brought into the ambit of the lives of fallen human beings. What Luther did was to uphold the dynamic of the word of God and the Holy Spirit at work with it in his sola scriptura. His hermeneutic removed that cultural manipulation which tried to accommodate human philosophy at the expense of the truth of God’s divine wisdom and mystery. In doing so he isolated and exposed the state of human capacity since the Fall in relation to God’s saving purpose for his people, their will, intellect, feelings, or any other faculty. When the depth of human sin is exposed (CA2), the height of the glory of God’s grace in Christ is exposed in faith (CA4) for victorious praise and worship of God.

If we want to know how important Luther regarded this insight to be, we need only note how he wanted his Bondage of the Will together with his Catechism to be seen as his two most important writings. He recognised where the church was most in danger. It is in Bondage of the Will that Luther provided a freedom for a powerful Christian confession for mission. It was a fredom from the restrictions of human philosophy in medieval Scholasticism and especially the humanism of the Renaissance made popular by Erasmus. Luther’s treatment applies equally to the rationalism that continued to develop and now postmodern deconstruction. Pitting human capacity against the word of Christ is boosting the ego and becomes an affront to our Lord himself.

If, therefore, we want to deal with the deconstruction that has taken place for a mission direction in our Church, we need to recognise the extent to which we have conceded to a postmodern hermeneutic in relation to the integrity, the truth, of the Word of God. This is the hermeneutic which “approach(es) a text not to find out what it objectively means, but to unmask what it is hiding” (Veith). When that happens we are no longer able to discern clearly what is God’s will in relation to cultural pressures of the world, and it is the unity of the Church that suffers.

The issue that has been hardest for the Church to deal with in recent times has been that of the ordination of women. It is here that we have seen the greatest pressure of a hermeneutic which has succumbed to postmodern philosophy. The literature distributed to the Church promoting the ordination of women provides the clearest evidence. If we read the signs, the same hermeneutical principles apply as with the issue of the ordination of homosexuals. We have seen clearly enough what the consequences overseas and in other churches has been. For the Lutheran Church with God-given confessions, when the Word of God is manipulated, that same kind of manipulation appears in church politics, unity in the faith is dissipated and mission declines.

The other issue that we face is that of applying for full membership in Lutheran World Federation. Are we going to succumb to the cultural pressures that would hinder us from confessing clearly as a church the true presence of Christ in the Sacrament as the Reformation fought for it with full membership? We need to understand that some very large member churches have had to deal with pressures from state involvement with the church or have already forfeited the Lutheran confession of faith embodied in the Sacrament. Again there is a postmodern hermeneutic involved. To say we make our confession as members is a denial of what confessing membership would involve.

We can easily underestimate what we as a church have lost in removing the fear of God from the Commandments in our Catechism. The word, ‘honour’, is no substitute. It is only a concession to secular psychology. We have failed to teach joyfully and confidently that fear of God is the antidote for every other fear as our Lord’s teaching so clearly shows in many parts of Scripture. Are we succumbing to fear of human opinion, human pressures, at the expense of the fear of God? This also affects our mission. Here Paul’s words are appropriate. For we must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due to him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad. Since then we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men (2 Cor. 5:10-11a).

A faithful confession was for Hermann Sasse a prime concern. This appeared again in his article, Confession of Faith (“Intervarsity”, March 1960). For him, confession of faith, confession of sin and praise of God belonged together. He concluded the article:

The confessing church. . .stands always at the border of time and eternity. . . . The confession is made before governors and kings. This confession before the earthly judge is made with the help of the Holy Spirit, as is every true confession (Matt10:18f; comp. 1Cor. 12:3). To confess Christ is dangerous. It involves a risk of life. Still more dangerous is it to deny Christ. This can happen very easily as is indicated by the fact that Peter, the first confessor, became the first to deny his Lord. . . . More dangerous it is because eternal death may follow. For we confess not only before a human judgement seat, but also before the judgement seat of God. Confession and denial follow us into eternity. There the earthly confession will be followed by the heavenly confession, not only by the eternal praise of God in the ecclesia triumphans, but also in the confession of Christ: ‘Whosoever shall confess me before men, him will I confess before my Father in heaven.’ As the confession is the answer to the question of our Lord [‘Who do you say I am?’ Mark 8:27ff], so His confession will be the answer to every faithful confession made here on earth.

Our concern is about mission. It is about a fearless confession of faith in a time when we have a message of peace, joy and victory in Jesus as Lord and Christ so much in contrast to the rampant fear and unrest all around us. This requires us to take seriously, as a matter of life and death, God’s grace in giving us a Church with a confession. It is God’s grace that he has given us a confessional direction in mission. And it will be by God’s grace that he helps us to discern in ourselves as his church where our culture is misleading us and where, in true Christian freedom, culture can be used powerfully and effectively to bring the Gospel to others.

Gordon Gerhardy. 13.06.03