The following paper was delivered at the 2024 meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in a section entitled “Lutherans and Global Evangelicalism.”
A formula like “Global Evangelicalism” is obviously expansive enough to include virtually any topic one may choose. But when I heard the theme and considered the opportunity of presenting in the Lutheran parallel session under that umbrella, my thoughts went immediately to the church—probably a combination of the word global with my own ecclesiological preoccupation. It required less than a minute of reflection to arrive at an entire presentation fully formed in my head: the important role that Lutheranism can play for the evangelical community in bringing it more meaningfully and completely into integration with the church catholic. But that naïve incipient thought raised a host of notoriously intractable questions and my initial enthusiasm consequently, and wisely, waned. A little sober and honest reflection revealed to me the problem that was no doubt already patently obvious to all of you: what do parochial Lutherans like me have to say to anyone about the need to integrate more fully and meaningfully with the universal church! Even leaving aside all the standard ecumenical problems, the recognition of my own intransigent Lutheran parochialism was enough to compel me to craft a rather different essay to appear beneath the romantic title I had contrived and instantly begun to cherish.
So, instead of lecturing other faithful evangelical followers of Christ, who probably aren’t present or interested anyway, about how they should be doing a better job of following, I’ll lecture for a bit to the choir and give the politely present home team some things to consider. This is not to say that Evangelicalism needs no lectures or that it couldn’t learn a thing or two from their odd Lutheran brothers and sisters who seem sometimes to smell a tad too Roman. I do still think that Lutheranism has much to offer on several fronts including: our regard for a strong connection to the long tradition that stretches not only back to the Reformation but through the Middle Ages all the way back to Chalcedon, Nicaea, and Jerusalem; our embrace of Sacraments that actually deliver what Jesus promised; our dynamic and powerful conception of the interface between God’s two realms of activity in the creation; and our appreciation for the wonders of faithful liturgical practice. Yes, Lutheranism has much to offer Global Evangelicalism. But as I said, I determined today to aim my words at a bunch of evangelicals closer to home; I want us as Lutherans to consider what a Ponte Luterano might mean for us.
The inspiration for my title comes straight from the final short chapter of Adolf Köberle’s marvelous book, The Quest for Holiness. The English translation was copyrighted in 1936, but I didn’t get around to reading it until early this century. I had heard of it, and had heard the occasional exhortations to read it, but you know how life in the parish unfolds. And then a copy reprinted by Ballast Press was personally gifted to me by the publisher himself and, feeling obliged, I read it . . . and my still relatively young graduate school mind was blown. Köberle’s book remains in the top five of most significant texts I’ve read. What it teaches about the intricate and absolute correlation of justification and sanctification—both fully accomplished only by the direct, comprehensive, and exhaustive action of God himself and both fully and unflinchingly the entire responsibility of each human person—is essential for rightly grasping the heart of our confession. But I’ve already addressed that vital topic on multiple occasions in a variety of venues. For today, the final three pages of the book are sufficient for my present purpose as they provide a critical lesson of their own.
Let’s hear Köberle’s key argument in full:
We have to struggle continually with the temptation not to become unjust, annoyed and sarcastic when we find one of the great truths of Scripture, whether justification or sanctification, exalted at the expense of the other. The more thoroughly this is done in any one case the further the resulting separation from the totum verbum of Scripture, the more antagonistic our attitude towards such a movement is bound to become. We can understand the violence of the controversies because each antagonist, with a certain justification, sees in his opponent a manifestation of that evil spirit that lies in a partial truth, and yet we cannot favor either party because both are fundamentally in the same condemnation. If we turn aside from both and try to express the two statements, in their proper order and in correct relation to each other, we must be ready to assume the cross of the misunderstanding of this paradox that will come from either side and the attacks that are bound to follow. Anyone who is unable to perceive these consequences will probably class him as a “spokesman of mediation,” as “a man of compromise,” a “virtuoso in bridge building.”[1]
And there it is: the Lutheran bridge. Köberle rightly applies the bridge metaphor to the situation created by the impossible riddle of divine monergism and human accountability both fully relevant and in full force in both justification and sanctification. In a final footnote, Köberle cites the source of this remarkable insight about the need to maintain both sides of the reality. It was the President of the Lutheran Church in Bavaria, Hermann Bezzel. In 1926, in his Berufung und Beruf, Bezzel wrote:
I might say that it is a most thankless undertaking but still the true Lutheran principle always to follow the middle course, not because it is the most convenient but because it is the most difficult. The middle course involves such a degree of self-restraint and self-denial, such readiness to carry the reproach of Jesus that only the Church that in all her existence has not hesitated to bear the reproach of her Savior has been in a position to do so. Extreme views have the advantage of remarkable consistency. People who carry out any idea even to the point where it becomes impossible are called firm characters, when in fact they are obstinate. Men think they have discovered a peculiar characteristic of Lutheranism, a special strength of its Confessions, in all their parts, when they can take any correct idea out of its proper relations, from which and for which it came into existence, generalize it, universalize it, and simply reject all the practical consequences that might be drawn from it. That is very bold and also very cheap, but it is not Christian nor apostolic.”[2]
I would suggest that it is not the difficulty of the middle course that makes it the right path, but instead it is the truthfulness of that trajectory that commends it to us. In other words, we should not hold to the middle way merely because it invites suspicion, accusation, and rejection in concert with the way of our Lord; but we maintain the path of twofold tension and unresolved duality because it is the truth about the reality that God has established in Christ. This emphasis on recognizing the tension, duality, binary, or dyad nature of doctrinal truths is, as Bezzel writes, a hallmark of good Lutheran theology, which means, of course, that it is a defining feature of all faithful doctrinal expression. It is important to remember that the Lutheran Confessions and those who hold to them show no interest in establishing the parameters of a unique Christian denomination nor in articulating the contours of a distinctive identity, nor arguing for a doctrinal system unique to a particular tradition within Christianity. To confess Lutheran doctrine is simply to confess the Christian church’s doctrine. Good theology is all about recognizing and upholding all the powerful tensions that are there. This is the insight driving both Bezzel and Köberle. They are entirely right.
The twofold nature of Christian doctrine appears over and over again in every faithful confession. Law and gospel, two kinds of righteousness, now and not yet, the two kingdoms, the two realms, the two natures in Christ, and the human and divine aspect of Scripture are just a few that come immediately to mind. It is worth noting, here, that these dyads or tensions are not necessarily contradictory or paradoxical. We are not faced with mutually repellent and attractive opposites, a positive and a negative, being forcefully held together in a mutually contradictory polarity. Instead, the tensions are almost always better seen as compatible and mutually reinforcing truths that simply belong together by divine intention and revelation. Jesus is at once both God and man; one is not negative and the other positive. Law and gospel are not mutually exclusive antonyms held together only by divine fiat or formulaic preaching; no, law and gospel are two complementary aspects of God’s living word. Holding both sides of a dyad is not always easy. Tenaciously maintaining the truth of a tension is bound to get you into trouble within anyone who has opted, for whatever reason good or bad, to emphasize only one or the other sides of the duality. Bezzel is right, holding the tension makes you the target of reproach. You’re likely to be called a moderate or a fence-sitter or as Köberle puts it, “a virtuoso in bridge building.” But that is the Lutheran, apostolic, Christian way. We Lutherans build bridges, and we seek to hold things together. We do it because we follow Christ.
So, we finally get to the point of this little lecture and turn our attention to the church and the twofold realities that define her and shape her life and activity. There are many dualities at work in a right understanding of the church. Since the church is the living body of Christ at work witnessing his reality to the world, she shares her Lord’s very nature. She is at once fully divine and other-worldly while being at the same time utterly, awkwardly, and disappointingly human and this-worldly. Like those who people her pews, she is at once a saint and a sinner: perfectly holy and in desperate need of grace. The church also bears the necessary duality of being at once visible and easily discerned through her preaching and administration of Sacraments, and also impenetrably invisible and beyond any human ability to discern. We can know certainly where the church is through the right practice of her outward signs or marks. Luther names those as preaching, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, Office of the Keys or church discipline, the pastoral office in action, worship, and suffering. And yet we can never know for sure the who of the church, those who are true believers and so followers of Christ. So the church always has two aspects or parts but remains always and only one church—like Jesus: one person, two natures. We see and affirm the outward visible parts, and delight to confess the invisible reality that is unbounded and not limited by the constraints of either time or space. Finally, we recognize the dual reality that the one church is at once local and universal. Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in San Diego, five miles across town, is the church and so is the perfect communion of every single believer from every time and place throughout all of history both the living and the dead who are all confessing that Jesus is Lord. All these twofold tensions are true in our confession of the church.
Today, though, gathered here in the belly of Evangelicalism—in the one time and place each year when the amorphous Christian movement actually starts to look like a concrete, tangible, living reality that is more than merely an idea—it is one more essential ecclesial tension that deserves our particular attention as Lutherans. This is the tension of doctrinal purity over against ecclesial unity. Like all the other tensions that mark our Christian confession, this one must be maintained and not allowed to veer in one direction to the exclusion or diminution of the other. Both sides of the dyad are vital. The church must have pure doctrine, and the church must be recognized and treated as a unified reality.
The centrality of doctrinal precision and rigor certainly lives quite comfortably in my own little Lutheran world. It hardly seems necessary to offer even a perfunctory defense of my claim that a pervasive doctrinal preoccupation resides in my synodical home. Still, it is worthwhile to consider the scriptural grounding for our position and the emphasis insisted upon by Luther. Jesus indicated the importance of hewing to his word of truth: “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine;and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”[3] St. Paul continued the emphasis on the holding fast to the central teaching of the church that was consistently and persistently taught in its fulness everywhere. He stresses this especially in his first letter to the Corinthians: In chapter four: “For this reason I have sent to you Timothy, who is my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, and he will remind you of my ways which are in Christ, just as I teach everywhere in every church.”[4] Chapter 11: “Now I praise you because you remember me in everything and hold firmly to the traditions, just as I delivered them to you.”[5] And in chapter 15: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.”[6] The theme appears also in Paul’s letter to Titus where he described a faithful overseer or bishop as a man known for “holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.”[7] At the core of the Christian confession was a tradition, a paradosis, which was handed down through the apostolic and pastoral instruction of the church. It was the rule of faith, the regula fidei or the corpus doctrinae. It mattered.
Of course, Luther also routinely and zealously celebrated the essential importance of doctrine. Some of his most pointed comments coming in his great Galatians commentary.
With the utmost rigor we demand that all articles of Christian doctrine, both large and small—although we do not regard any of them as small—be kept pure and certain. This is supremely necessary. For this doctrine is our only light, which illumines and directs us and shows the way to heaven; If it is overthrown in one point, it must be overthrown completely. And when that happens, our love will not be of any use to us. We can be saved without love and concord with the Sacramentarians, but not without pure doctrine and faith. Otherwise, we shall be happy to observe love and concord toward those who faithfully agree with us on all the articles of Christian doctrine. We shall gladly show love to, and live in harmony with, those who together with us, have godly views about all articles of Christian doctrine. . . . “One dot of doctrine is worth more than “heaven and earth” (Mt 5:18); therefore, we do not permit the slightest offense against it.[8]
Doctrine certainly matters. But then, so does the unity of the church. Here Paul is also quite explicit: Again, famously, in Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”[9] And in Ephesians, “Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”[10] And, of course, the apostle is merely echoing what his Lord had taught his disciples and earnestly prayed to his Father, “The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.” The centrality of this confession was given timeless and authoritative expression at Nicaea: “I believe in one holy, catholic, apostolic church.”
And Luther was also aware of the importance of the church’s unity: “I shall not be found wanting in any respect if it please God; I shall do and suffer as much as I possibly can to achieve a true, sound, permanent unity. Experience has taught us very clearly what “good” the disunity of the churches does—unfortunately.”[11] And while in the Smalcald Articles he could write off all of Rome as not part of the one church, “We do not concede to them that they are the church, and frankly they are not the church.”[12] He would also grant that by the standard of love all those who confessed Christ were indeed members of his one body.[13] As Pieper clarifies, “We call heterodox church bodies both ‘churches’ and ‘sects,’ depending on whether we have in mind the good or the evil in them. Churches they are in so far as they still retain enough of the Gospel of Christ that men can come to faith in Christ and thus can become true children of God.”[14] The church is one church despite the fractures that afflict it. Kurt Marquart puts it well, “There is only one church because there is only one Lord . . . —and He is not polygamous. The all-embracing unity that reigns within this church is not a mechanical, egalitarian uniformity, but a rich harmony-in-diversity befitting the organic integration of a living body.”[15]
Clearly, these two sides of the reality of the church: the need for doctrinal fidelity and precision and the comprehensive unity of the entire church are not a polarity. There is nothing inherently contradictory about them. In fact, they rightly and absolutely belong together. Unity in the church always means unity in confession, unity in practice, and unity in doctrine. There is one Lord and one truth and so one regula fidei for the whole church. The church is not poly-doctrinal. Yet, from the very beginning, the perfection of the church in unity, confession, and practice was challenged. The Council at Jerusalem had a happy outcome, of course, but the very fact that the council was even necessary confirms the reality of the tendency to fracturing and alienating that was present from the beginning. Paul’s repeated exhortations to the churches to be “of the same mind” (Phil 2:2), also continually remind us that unity is not automatic or by default. It takes work. And it takes some clarity on how best to approach the inevitably messy and fraught interface between the church’s overarching and enduring unity and her faithful confession of doctrinal truth. Finding that clarity is not easy. Ask St. Paul or Ambrose or Aquinas, or Luther, or Walther, or any other theologian, or any other thoughtful Christian living at any place anywhere at any time in history.
The challenge of adhering faithfully to the corpus doctrinae in word and deed while simultaneously recognizing and celebrating the church’s foundational unity is never easy. Finding the way between unionism on the one hand and schism on the other is a confounding challenge. Far too many have failed to hold the tension. We see the evidence all too clearly: on the one side, are hollowed out claimants to the name of Christ who have no substance and offer only an infamous sloppy agape of superficial fellowship in the name of unity; and on the other side, we see unbending, intractable, yet brittle doctrinal arrogance manifest in splintered confessions, riven church bodies, fractured faculties, cleaved congregations, and fragmented, frozen families. Rightly navigating the duality demands continual awareness and deliberate choosing to find a faithful path. And I think it is important to admit that there must always be an indefinite article, here. We seek a faithful path. To suggest that there is a singular, definite-article path misses the whole point of living in a tension. Those who insist on finding the right way invariably take a path that veers to one or the other extreme: either ignoring doctrine for the sake of unity or dismissing the necessity of cultivating and celebrating unity for the sake of doctrinal exactitude.
Harking back to the wisdom of Köberle, we need to recognize that our task, our Lutheran responsibility, is to hold tenaciously to both sides of the duality between doctrinal fidelity and ecclesial unity. This is not a new thought, I suppose, but I think there is a genuine temptation for us is to become acclimated and settled with our shattered status quo. Indeed, this is far more than a temptation, it is a reality. Division has become the norm, and we have adopted and affirmed this sad reality without a second thought or a whim of regret. It’s just the settled, given reality. It is past time for us to give the tension between doctrinal fidelity and ecclesial unity a careful second thought.
Such second and third thinking demands that we begin to face a long list of questions that need our attention—and I must warn you, most of the questions are old, unwelcome, and confounding; they seem to defy any possibility of a solution: how do we decide which doctrines actually must be church dividing? Where exactly does doctrine stop and adiaphora start? How long can one extend a spirit of patient toleration for an errant doctrinal confession? When does careless or even bad practice warrant church division? How do we reconcile the need for common practices (especially when it comes to worship) that enhance and cultivate unity with the necessary assertion of adiaphora as one of the very doctrines that binds and norms us? What can we do to foster and celebrate the oneness of the church that does still exist even with those whose doctrinal disparity has been deemed church-dividing? There are so many questions, and so few good answers. Maybe we should do something about that . . . or at least try. Isn’t it right for Christians like us who revel in theological tensions to try to navigate this perplexing duality a bit more faithfully? At the very minimum can we perhaps manage to muster some modicum of tangible angst as we confront the dilemma of how to maintain in our concrete actions the reality of a universal church that is the one body of Christ present in the world even as we grieve the tragedy of that body being torn apart by doctrinal disparity? I’m at the end of my time and have no answers; but that was never my intent. My goal is simply to highlight the importance of this neglected tension and extend the challenge to begin working in earnest more faithfully to address it.
This is our heritage. Holding tensions is our specialty. Bridge building is the name of our game. So, we may as well get on with it when it comes to the nature and reality of the church: we revel in doctrinal fidelity, and we celebrate ecclesial unity—both at once. The Ponte Luterano needs to be built and maintained not just for the sake of the future of Evangelicalism or even the church. It needs to be built for the sake of the world—because bridges lead to bridgeheads where God’s eternal, glorious reality can break into a world crying out for redemption.
[1] Adolf Köberle, The Quest for Holiness (Evansville: Ballast Press, 1998), 266–267.
[2] Hermann Bezzel, Berufung und Beruf (Neuendettelsau, 1926), 64–65.
[3] John 8:31–32. All Scripture quotations are from the 1998 NASB.
[4] 1 Corinthians 4:17.
[5] 1 Corinthians 11:2.
[6] 1 Corinthians 15:3.
[7] Titus 1:9.
[8] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 27 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1964), 41.
[9] Galatians 3:28.
[10] Ephesians 4:1–3.
[11] Ewald Plass, What Luther Says. no. 4535, pg. 1407. Letter to Strassburg May 29, 1536.
[12] Robert Kolb, T. J. Wengert, and Charles P. Arand, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 324.
[13] Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics vol. 3 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1953), 424.
[14] Ibid., 423.
[15] Kurt Marquart, The Church and Her Fellowship, Ministry, and Governance (Waverly, IA: International Foundation for Lutheran Confessional Research, 1990), 25.
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