LutheranTheology.com

Part 6

The Church

It remains for us to present Walther’s position on individual doctrines that have become controversial.

First, however, we must note that Walther was not a theologian who had a few favorite doctrines that he cultivated and emphasized while neglecting other doctrines that were also clearly revealed in God’s Word. This has indeed been the manner of not a few men who have become famous in the Church. They thereby demonstrated that they could at most stand at the head of a sect, but could not work in a truly ecclesiastical manner. No, Walther was a truly ecclesiastical theologian, who sought with the greatest faithfulness to actually teach and preserve everything that is entrusted to the Church as doctrine in Holy Scripture. Although, on the one hand, he was well able to distinguish individual doctrines in terms their absolute necessity for the creation and preservation of faith, he nevertheless upheld all the doctrines of the Christian faith with the utmost care, as his teaching at the seminary and in the ecclesiastical periodicals testifies.1

However, circumstances dictated that Walther had to devote very special attention and work to certain doctrines. Walther’s position on these doctrines shall be pointed out in what follows.

The doctrine that not only occupied the Saxon immigrants immediately after their arrival, but became a question of life and death for them, is the doctrine of the Church. “We are no longer a church,” was the cry of many hearts, when the man whom most of them had followed with the greatest trust as their leader and bishop had fallen away, and thereby the edifice of that church in which, until then, they had seen the true Church, was shattered as if with a single blow. It was primarily Walther who convincingly answered the question, “What is the Church?”, from Scripture, the Confessions, and Luther’s writings, and thereby successfully warded off the confusion that threatened to tear the small congregations apart.

How Walther and the Missouri Synod arrived at the doctrine of the Church, as it is presented, for example, in Walther’s book “The Voice of Our Church on the Question of Church and Ministry,” is still the subject of entirely false views being spread about in Germany to this day. It is said that Walther modeled the doctrine according to the particular circumstances of American democracy. But the exact opposite is the case. First, the immigrants were still barely acquainted with the “American” ecclesiastical conditions by the time the question of Church and Ministry had already been decided among them. Later on, when they came into closer contact with these “American” circumstances, it was not these circumstances that exerted a decisive influence on them, but the reverse. “We have” — says Walther — “opposed the abuses prevailing in American ecclesiastical circles with all our might. In many of them, we have successfully abolished the hiring and firing of pastors, as well as the absolute power of the congregation.”2 Certainly, these circumstances into which God allowed this little household of immigrants to come were the occasion for them to recognize the doctrine of the Church which they now confessed to be the right one. However, this doctrine itself is not taken from their circumstances, but was gained during a time of intense temptation and great tribulation through the study of God’s Word, the Confessions, and especially the writings of Luther. Walther himself writes about this in the preface to Church and Ministry:

As willingly as we admit that the circumstances under which we live here in America have had a decisive influence on our vividly recognizing the doctrine of Church and Ministry laid down in this work, holding fast to it as a precious treasure, and now confidently confessing it before all the world; we must decidedly reject the accusation that we have bent and molded the holy, pure doctrine of our Church in favor of our circumstances. Since we do not stand here in ecclesiastical circumstances which we have inherited from others, but rather are in the position both of having to lay this foundation from the ground up and having the ability to lay it, unhindered by what already exists: these circumstances have compelled us to search with great earnestness for the principles which, according to God’s Word and the Confessions of our Church, determine how a truly Lutheran community must be constituted, and how it must be formed. For us, it is less a question of: “What can we retain without sin?”, but rather: “How should it be according to God’s Word and the principles expressed and proven in our church’s Confessions?” — the more urgent was our need for clarity and certainty of faith concerning the principles of the doctrine of Church, Ministry, the power of the Keys, Church Order, and the like. We have not modeled the doctrine of our Church according to our circumstances, but rather ordered our circumstances according to the doctrine of our Church. To anyone who doubts this, we confidently call out: Come and see! And if anyone is astonished to discover that the principles and doctrines which we present, the very ones he had until now abhorred as fanaticism, are in fact the principles and doctrines of the Lutheran Church, we can confidently refer to the proofs we have already furnished, and leave him the choice of either allowing us the glory of Lutheran orthodoxy, or denying the same to the whole cloud of faithful witnesses from Luther down to a Baier and Hollaz.3

In response to the assertion that the doctrine of Church and Ministry expressed in the Confessions of our Church is “still undeveloped and unclear,” Walther says in the same preface:

We are convinced that the Lutherans are now divided about the important doctrines of Church and Ministry and what is directly related to them because one party departs and deviates from the doctrine laid down in the public Confessions of our Church and developed in the private writings of its orthodox teachers. We are convinced that our Church has neither failed to discuss the doctrines of Church and Ministry such that they still today await further development, nor has it — and much less — clouded these doctrines in any way and given them a crooked position in the whole doctrinal structure such that only now could they be set straight. We are firmly convinced that the great and decisive battle of the Reformation which our Church fought against the Papacy in the 16th century was centered around precisely these doctrines of Church and Ministry which have now again become questions among us, and this pure and clear doctrine is a precious booty which our Church carried away from that battle.4

What actually is the Church? Walther, in his dogmatics class, designated this question at the outset as the chief question and the deciding factor in the entire doctrinal locus of the Church and what is connected with it. “The main thing is to know what the Church is, actually and essentially.”

Before the Reformation, the papacy did not know what the Church is, nor did they want to know it. A man who did know it and spoke it out loud, was burned at Constance.5 Through Luther it became known again what the Church is, and indeed so well known that Luther could write in the Smalcald Articles6: “Praise God, a seven-year-old knows what the Church is, namely the holy believers and the sheep who hear their Shepherd’s voice. For thus the children pray: ‘I believe in one holy Christian Church.’” In our time, this childlike wisdom has again become almost as unknown to many who call themselves Lutheran as it was under the Papacy. To the question of what the Church is, even those who are respected in the Lutheran Church give widely varying answers, and none of them the simple and only correct one, that Christians are the Church. They offer the following as the essential elements which supposedly constitute the Church: Christ, the means of grace, believers and hypocrites, the office of the means of grace or the order of teachers and learners; in one specific church constitution they add: those who govern and those who obey.7 From these and other elements such people constructed the “Church.” For most, the Church is an “external polity,” an “institution” in which Christians form a more or less essential part, only they are not the Church itself. — It is now obvious how, with this confusion regarding the concept of the Church, especially with the conception of the Church as an “institution,” no one can remedy the much-lamented defects of the Church. How can anyone help the Church if he does not know what the Church actually is! If he considered the Church to be what it actually is, namely the congregation of believers, then he would primarily direct his care on that which creates and preserves believers and makes them children of God, namely, on the preaching of pure doctrine; and he would resolutely fight and abolish everything that hinders and destroys faith, namely false doctrine. But because he essentially regards the Church as an institution and a set of orders and relationships, his care for the welfare of the Church primarily consists in maintaining or re-establishing such orders; indeed, he anxiously avoids everything that might disturb the ecclesiastical “institution.”

According to Walther, then, the Church is the totality of all believers. No more and no less. No more: for no ungodly or unregenerate person belongs to the Church, even though he may stand in the external fellowship of the Church, and indeed may hold the highest offices in it. No less: for all believers on the whole earth belong to the Church, whether they are in the visible fellowship of the orthodox Church, or are held captive among the sects and the Papacy;8 also those wrongly excommunicated, if they have faith, belong to the Church, as well as those not yet formally received into the Church through baptism, if they have already come to faith through the Gospel. In short, membership in the Church is determined solely by living faith in Christ. In Walther’s writing “The Voice of Our Church” the first two theses “on the Church” read: “The Church, in the proper sense of the word, is the communion of saints, that is, the totality of all those who, called by the Holy Spirit through the Gospel out of the lost and condemned human race, truly believe in Christ and through this faith are sanctified and incorporated into Christ. To the Church, in the proper sense of the word, belongs no ungodly person, no hypocrite, no unregenerate person, no heretic.” Walther proves this with passages like Eph. 1:22–23, Eph. 5:23–27, where Christ is called the head of the Church and the Church is called the body of Christ, and where the Church is presented as “subject to Christ” and as “sanctified” and “cleansed” by Him. He remarks on Eph. 1:22–23: “If according to this Christ is the Head of the Church and the Church is His body, then the actual true Church is the totality of all those who are united to Christ as the members of a body are united with their head”; and on Matt. 16:18: “On this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”: “The Church in the proper sense is therefore built of its members on the rock of Christ and His Word: but only he is built upon it who is founded upon it in living faith.” “So further St. Paul writes Rom. 8:9: ‘If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His.’ But whoever does not belong to Christ is also not a member of the true Church, which is His spiritual body.”9

To describe the relationship of the ungodly to the Church, Walther liked to use Gerhard’s expression: “The ungodly are indeed in the Church” (according to the external fellowship), “but not of the Church,” and Calov’s word: “Although hypocrites are in that group in which the Church is, yet they are not properly in the group which is the Church.” Between believers and hypocrites, even if they are outwardly in the same fellowship, there always remains as great a difference as that between Christ’s kingdom and the devil’s kingdom. According to Walther, the fact that Christ, the means of grace, the pastoral office, etc. are made into essential elements of the Church, is due to the fact that what is necessarily connected with the Church it taken as the Church itself. Against this “error much spread in our time” Walther excerpts the following from the Mecklenburgische Theol. Zeitschrift (L. u. W, vol. 9, p. 284) against this “widespread error of our time”:

That which cannot be separated from the Church, without which the Church cannot exist, which therefore necessarily belongs to the Church in a certain sense, does not fall within the Lutheran concept of the Church proper, does not belong to that which constitutes the Church, the communion of saints, Christianity proper. Thus man cannot live without air and without daily bread, but air and daily bread do not thereby belong to the concept of man; mankind cannot exist without the earth on which it dwells, and without the heaven which arches over it, and without the sun that rises shining and warming over it, yet the concept of mankind is distinct from all this, does not coincide with the concept of the universe. Christ, the head of the Church, is inseparable from the Church, which is His body; the existence of the Church would be destroyed if it were separated from the Head, from the Lord dwelling in it and working through the means of grace, but yet Christ does not belong in the concept of the Church, which is precisely the body of Christ distinct from the Head. The same is true of the means of grace, of the Word and the Sacraments. Through them the Church receives its life from the Head, without them the Church lacks the reason for its existence; nevertheless they do not belong to the scope of the Lutheran concept of the Church; inseparable from it, they are nevertheless distinct from it. The means of grace are given to the Church by the Lord; the Church has them, uses them, lives through them; in the Church they are administered in the service of the Lord, so that the work of the Lord may forever continue through them, increasing and perfecting the Church, but they are not the Church itself in any way. Therefore the rightly administered means of grace are also designated as the notae [marks] of the true Church. They are so called not because thereby, as it were, a part of the Church emerges and becomes visible, but because according to God’s Word it is certain for faith that where the means of grace are rightly administered, they do not remain without fruit. For the Lutheran doctrine, the questions: “What is the Church?” and: “Who belongs to the Church?” do not differ at all; for the Church is the communion of believers.

If the Church is essentially the communion of believers, then it is invisible. Walther refers to the passages, Luke 17:20–21:

“The kingdom of God does not come with outward observation. Neither will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” According to 1 Pet. 2:5: “the Church is a spiritual house, in which spiritual priests offer spiritual sacrifices that are acceptable to God; it is therefore invisible.”10 According to 2 Tim. 2:19: “the Lord alone knows those who are his; but only those who are the Lord’s make up the true Church; therefore no man can see the Church.”11 Walther writes in the first volume of Der Lutheraner (p. 83): “The Church is not a visible institution, like a state, but an invisible kingdom, a spiritual building erected in the hearts of men by God’s Spirit… It is indisputable” (from John 18:36, Luke 17:20–21), “that the true Church of Christ is never actually visible. Nor can it be otherwise. For since only truly believing regenerate Christians are members of the Church, no one can say: these or those people are the Church; for everyone can and should indeed be certain, as far as he himself is concerned, that he is in Christ and Christ in him; but no one can be infallibly certain about any other person whether he is a child of God, that is, whether he is a living stone of the spiritual house of God, i.e., of the Church. As Solomon says: ‘God alone knows the heart of the children of men,’ 2 Chron. 6:30… Therefore we confess: ‘I believe in one Church,’ but faith is the ‘assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,’ Heb. 11:1.” And even if the people who form the Church can be seen, because they are seen as bodily people, but not as spiritual people who belong to the house of the Church (1 Pet. 2:5), it therefore remains firm that the Church, as a spiritual house built of spiritual people, is invisible.12 Therefore the holy Christian Church here on earth is invisible at all times. Not only at the times when the Papacy ruled, but also in times when the light of the Gospel shines brightly in the land.13

Through the preaching of the Word and the administration of the Sacraments the presence of the Church is indeed recognized, but it is not thereby made visible in its essence, just as the soul clearly manifests its existence in the body without itself becoming visible.”14

Footnotes

  1. Cf. Pastorale, p. 90 f.
  2. We remind once again that we quote from handwritten notes where we do not expressly refer to a printed work.
  3. Kirche und Amt, 3rd ed., Preface VIII.
  4. See V. VI.
  5. See citations from Aeg. Hunnius and Luther in Walther’s Baier, vol. III, pp. 614, 619.
  6. Smalcald Articles, Part III, Art. 12. Müller p. 324.
  7. Cf. the excerpts from the writings of the modern theologians, L. u. W., vol. 16, pp. 162 f.
  8. Der Lutheraner, vol. 11, pp. 17–18.
  9. K. u. A. p. 2.
  10. Die ev.-luth. Kirche die wahre sichtbare Kirche, p. 11.
  11. K. u. A. p. 15.
  12. K. u. A. p. 22; Der Lutheraner, vol. 1, p. 21.
  13. K. u. A. p. 21.
  14. Der Lutheraner, vol. 6, 9; vol. 1, 83; vol. 8, 42.