(This essay was posted to the CAT41 web site in December 2002. It was in response to another post in which it was claimed that an earlier post by Rev. Schellenbach indicated that his position on church and ministry was more WELS than LCMS. ed.)


Now, if I may be allowed to approach the same subject from a slightly different direction (one that I have already set forth in rough form on this list only a few months ago but which would, I believe, be beneficial to revisit and expand with quotes from Marquart's dogmatics book in the context of the current discussion) . . .

The difference between WELS and LCMS on the doctrine of Church and Ministry is not exactly what people usually think it is. To quote Anigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Most people seem to think that it's a matter of "WELS says Synod is Church, while LCMS says only the congregation is Church." And, as far as it goes, that's a true statement about one particular result or effect of the differences between the two Synods on this subject. But, like many such statements in theology, that's not the heart of the difference between Wauwatosa and St. Louis (never has been), and as such it is only a symptomatic, secondary difference between the two Synods, and, indeed, is a bit of an oversimplification. Consequently, when this statement is pressed as if it were itself the first principle of the difference rather than a mere symptom of it, it becomes as much of an error as the WELS position itself is, for it, too, like the WELS position, abandons the true Marks of the Church for a secondary and derivative way of determining what is, and is not, church (i.e., instead of looking for whether a particular local gathering possesses the pure Marks of the Church, it starts looking at the question, totally irrelevant from the perspective of the Confessions' own definition of the Church, of under which organization's auspices the gathering is being conducted - which criterion misses the point, and is therefore false doctrine, just as much as is the WELS' "unit concept," as we shall see below).

To quote Marquart, "The Church" (Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics), p. 221:

"New Missouri," on the other hand, has tended to see the churchly nature and dignity of the local congregation and its ministry more and more in juridical or organizational, rather than theological terms. Hence T. Graebner's fateful denial that anything beyond a local congregation is really church: "We can say, synod, territorial church, a formation like the EKiD belong to Christendom, are a part of it, but are not church" 10. This attitude, reflected also in A Statement of 1945 11, implied that synods and their officials might behave in unchurchly ways, since they were not churches and ministers anyway. This fostered organizationalism and unionism 12.

As for Walther and Pieper, it is not too much to say that they could not have imagined the Missouri Synod as a non-church. The whole point of the Synod's constitution was to enable "the confessing and teaching church" to attend jointly to "every particular churchly purpose," with the church's confession not a perfunctory formality, but actually shaping and permeating "the whole constitution and the church's entire way of acting" and "the discipline and governance of the church in general." 13 For Walther it was obvious that "particular churches" are not only local congregations but also entire confessional fellowships or communions, such as the Lutheran Church 14. In his famous Iowa District essay on the chief duties of a properly Lutheran synod Walther spoke of a synod as "a living member of the Body of Christ" and of the Missouri Synod as "a true daughter of her mother, namely, of the Lutheran Church of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession" 15. Pieper too defined "churches" as both "congregations and church bodies," 16 and in his essay on "Church and Church Government" insisted on the right government of the church through synodical arrangements 17.

The real difference between LCMS and WELS on the subject lies not so much in whether a particular entity is "Church," but in why. The problem with the Wisconsin Synod is not so much that they identify the Synod as Church, but in what sense and why they do so. WELS operates with a different understanding of how the Church is identified (i.e., what are her Marks) than Missouri does. Quoting Marquart again, this time from p. 46, footnote 10:

The Wisconsin Synod defined its "unit concept" thus: "Church fellowship is every joint expression, manifestation, and demonstration of the common faith in which Christians on the basis of their confession find themselves to be united with one another." The weakness here, despite the best intentions, was twofold: (1) The starting point was the faith of individuals and their de facto agreement, rather than the church's objective marks. This introduced a certain subjectivism into the premisies. (2) The definition, "every joint expression, etc." was too sweeping. It overlooked, among other things, the distinction between the two kingdoms. Taken literally, therefore, it would forbid joint political action against abortion, for instance, by Roman Catholic, Baptist, and Lutheran citizens, since, if they were all motivated by the love of Christ, their action would be a "joint expression" of faith, and so would constitute church fellowship. For detailed analysis and critique see European Supporting Documents, Part III, pp. 3-13, in the files of Concordia Historical Institute, St. Louis, Mo., and the public letter of 15 July 1961 from Doctors W.M. Oesch and M. Roentsch to President O.J. Naumann of the Wisconsin Synod (31 pp.).

In contrast, Old Missouri (and I mean really Old Missouri, that of Walther and Pieper themselves rather than those English-speaking theologians who habitually misrepresent and distort their theology in the name of "reclaiming" them) identifies the Church only where the Marks of the Church, i.e., the purely preached word and rightly administered Sacraments, are to be seen. It is true that this takes place only in local gatherings, and it is in that sense that it is true that only local congregations are visible manifestations of the Church and not larger bodies as such. It is not true, however, that those gatherings must take place under the auspices of a single autonomous nonprofit entity that happens to bear the name "congregation." They can also take place under the auspices of multiple such entities operating jointly (such as at a college campus chapel owned and operated by the Synod, that is, jointly by 6,000+ congregations), and still manifest the Marks of the Church fully, simply by virtue of the fact that the Word and Sacraments are preached and administered rightly in that place. The question of who owns and operates the place and thus calls the gathering together does not ordinarily affect the question of whether the Marks of the Church are there when they gather. (An exception, of course, is that where a false teaching church body's congregations jointly own and operate the place, the Marks aren't there fully or purely because the presence of the name of a false-teaching church body on the door already implicitly teaches whatever false doctrine that church body is guilty of.)

It might be helpful here if we revisit the different usages of the word "congregation" which come up in this discussion. There are two, which we shall call "congregation-r," for "right hand," and "congregation-l," for "left hand."

"Congregation-r" is the regular gathering of a group of God's people around the Word and Sacraments rightly preached and administered. Congregation-r is Church by definition, because the definition of the word is also the definition that the Confessions give for the word "Church," namely God's people gathered around the Means of Grace, which are themselves the Marks of the Church.

"Congregation-l" is the autonomous non-profit entity which normally owns and operates the church building where congregation-r meets, whose membership is ordinarily coterminous with that of congregation-r. Congregation-l, as such, is NOT Church. Congregation-l does many things which do not partake of the Marks of the Church. Holding a bake sale. Holding a picnic at a member's lake cabin up in the middle of nowhere (and a beautiful nowhere it is, by the way). Holding a community fish fry or venison stew and spaghetti feed. None of these things partake of the Marks of the Church, even though the entity which sponsors them is referred to as a "local congregation." If congregation-l as such were church, then so would all these other things be, but they're not.

What I am contending is that the Synod as such is a left-handed entity made up of all of its member congregation-l's, acting jointly. The reason why Synod as such is not Church is precisely because the congregation-l's in question are not Church.

However, where there is a regular gathering of God's people around Word and Sacrament that takes place under the auspices of the Synod or one of its Districts (and thus under the auspices of the congregations of that Synod or District acting jointly), that particular gathering is a congregation-r, and thus is Church, because it partakes of the pure Marks of the Church, the rightly preached Word and rightly administered Sacraments. Examples of this sort of congregation-r that is operated not by one congregation-l but by a number of them jointly include the Divine Service held in campus chapels at Synodically-owned colleges, the Divine Service held in a base chapel for the LCMS-member military personel (and guests) that happen to be stationed at that base by an LCMS chaplain, and the Divine Service conducted by a district-called missionary at large in a place where the local congregation hasn't yet been charterd. All of these things partake of the Marks of the Church, and all of them therefore are Church. Indeed, all of them are "local congregations" in the -r sense of the word. That the organization under whose auspices the gathering takes place is a joint operation of multiple congregations rather than one congregation acting autonomously, does not affect the presence of the Marks of the Church in the slightest.

My focus in the doctrine of the Church is on the Marks of the Church. This is where the Confessions focus as well. It is false doctrine to do otherwise. And that is exactly what is done when the status of "Church" is denied to a regular gathering that manifests the pure Marks, simply because that gathering is conducted under the auspices of an organization composed of multiple congregations rather than only one, that is, to quote Marquart again, when the "churchly nature and dignity of the local congregation and its ministry" are seen "more and more in juridical or organizational rather than theological terms." The WELS doctrine also focuses elsewhere than the pure Marks of the Church, namely on the "joint expression, manifestation, and demonstration of the common faith." Their statement that Synod is Church is a mere symptom of their error, not the root of it. The root of their error is that they look elsewhere than the pure Marks to find the Church. The problem is, the hyper-congregationalists who wish to defend Missouri's position but end up distorting it by going beyond it, do exactly the same thing, albeit in the opposite way, and end up (as Marquart points out on p. 221, expecially in footnote 11 and the text to which it refers, cited above) agreeing in principle, even if they disagree in conclusion, with the "Levels of Fellowship" and "Statement of the 44" type of unionists. This is just as false as is the WELS position.

In conclusion, yes, the WELS position has reared its ugly head in this discussion. But I'm not the one whose ideas resemble it.

Footnotes

10: Y. Brilioth, ed., World Lutheranism of Today. 115.

11: Thesis Six wanted "questions of fellowship" shifted more to "the local congregation."

12: The Crucibile, published briefly from London in 1939 by the brillian W.M. Oesch, was founded to counteract especially in Missouri also "the Calvinistic and Romanistic views of the nature of the Church (as though it were essentially visible and a sector of society) and of the the functions of the Church (as though it were one of its functions to assist society)."

13: Der Lutheraner, vol 3, no 1 [5 Sept. 1846], 2.

14: Church and Ministry, p. 111; True Visible Church, esp. theses IV [which cites the BC's 'entire churches inside or outside the Holy Empire of the German Nation"], and V-XXV. Thesis XXIII is mistranslated as though "particular churches" meant simply local congregations.

15: 1879 LCMS Iowa District Proceedings, 116, 118.

16: Christian Dogmatics, III:422-427.

17: "Kirche und Kirchenregiment," 1896 LCMS Proceedings, 27-46.

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