The Bible is the Word of God, therefore inerrant. Principles of Christian doctrine must rest firmly upon, conform to and pass muster before that Word. Church polity and practice must in turn be guided by those principles and not violate the standards embodied in them. Polities and practices that do so are "not to be tolerated in the church of God." New Missouri's position on church and ministry fails on all counts. Whether it will continue to be tolerated is up to the lay members and faithfulpastors of Synod.
First off, the principles that guide its polity and church and ministry practices are not founded on the authority of God's Word. That authority does not allow that an organization like a synod be considered a church - in any sense of the term as used in Scripture. Scripture knows no such form. Scripture does not allow that a synod has authority to administer the power of the office of the keys, that is, authority to forgive sins. Scripture knows no such authority. Scripture does not allow that the rite of ordination be the means of empowering a man to publicly administer the Word, the sacraments, or absolution. Scripture knows no such empowerment.
Scripture will not allow that a local congregation of believers be relieved of its exclusive God-given authority and mandate to publicly administer the office of the keys. It will not allow for the establishment of the office of the ministry of Word and sacrament in any way other than by means of the election and call of a local congregation. It will not allow the concept of an office of the ministry that is seen as a preexisting position waiting to be filled. It knows only of an office in the sense of that word defined as an authority conferred. It knows no caste system separating groups of believers. Scripture disallows all these things. New Missouri embraces them all - and makes them the rule and norm of its polity and church and ministry practices.
Norms, principles, practices. Get off to a bad start with norms and principles and practices can do nothing but follow along to produce chaos. So it is in New Missouri. Take ordination. There were three positions extant at last count: 1 - it's a divine ordinance. 2 - the call of a congregation is not consummated until ordination. 3 - the office of the ministry is divine but ordination and the election and call of a congregation are not. What happens with this last (and no, I'm not joking) is that at the very moment of the laying on of hands the divinity of the office flows back over the ordination, call and election making them divine, too. There is a fourth position out there, of course, the Scriptural position held over from Old Missouri, but it finds no place in official New Missouri.
Then there's the office of the ministry. All Christians are ministers. Jesus made us ministers when He told us to go into all the world and make disciples. But there are certain kinds of ministries that are of a public nature and demand special qualifications to perform. Fortunately, there are some men among us who have these qualifications. They are gifts to us from God and, through the good offices of the Synodical hierarchy (episcopacy) and by means of its ordination, they are inducted into the office of the ministry, special spiritual gifts are bestowed on them, and they are authorized and empowered to fulfill the many churchly functions the various types of churches are called on to perform, including the function of publicly administering the office of he keys.
Once ordained, always ordained, no matter if one ever serves in a local congregation or not. Ordination empowers a man to publicly preach, baptize, serve communion and absolve anywhereor anytimean occasion presents itself. And this is for life. Secular vocations notwithstanding, a person who has been ordained will always be entitled to proclaim, "I AM AN ORDAINED LUTHERAN MINISTER with authority to perform publicly various churchly functions including administering the office of the keys."
And finally there's the local congregation. There is no divine mandate demanding the gathering together of believers into this or any other type of organization. But it is only natural that Christians will organize in order to more effectively carry out the divine mandate to go into the whole world, make disciples, and teach them to observe everything Jesus has commanded them to do. Local congregations, synods, mission societies, missionary leagues, high schools, fraternal associations, these are examples of Christians joining together to fulfill the mission of spreading the Gospel. In this regard they are all church and on the same plane. Some, however, are more directly associated with this Gospel mission than others and thus serve a primary role. Since most will agree that a local congregation is the primary grouping it must be considered first among the throng.
A local congregation exists essentially to provide opportunity for participating in or being exposed to a variety of spiritually uplifting activities. Numbered among them are the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments. In order to properly perform these last named public functions a congregation must prayerfully select one of Synod's pastors-by-ordination. These men are God's gifts to the church(es), are in the office of the public ministry, have been empowered by their Synodical ordinations to forgive sins, and are certified by Synod to enter local congregations to work on the members with the Word and the sacraments.
Every churchly function that a congregation performs can be managed by anyone the congregation chooses. Anything, however, to do with spiritual matters or the administration of the office of the keys is outside its purview. This is a divine prerogative of the pastor alone granted to him by Synod through its ordination. The congregation's only connection here is seeing to it that the pastor is provided with helpers who will be ready to provide him assistance in carrying out the responsibilities associated with these particular churchly functions anytime he chooses to avail himself of it.
The argument is made that New Missouri's office of the ministry is the office instituted by Christ when He called the apostles. This is fog pure and simple. The office of the ministry instituted by Christ is the authority to publicly forgive sins by means of the Word and the sacraments. This authority (office) can be conferred only by the election and call of a divinely mandated local congregation of believers gathered together for the express purpose of administering that authority. The office of the ministry instituted arbitrarily by Cleveland Resolution 6-35 and entered into through the instrumentality of Synod's ordination has no authority to forgive sins, no authority to preach, no authority to commune, no authority to baptize, no authority to absolve, no authority to excommunicate. Put bluntly, it's a counterfeit office of the ministry.
This is further demonstrated by the special spiritual persona and divine authority supposedlyinfused by ordination and passed from generation to generation through the ranks of the clergy class or episcopacy. This is,in truth,an impossibility. Divine spirituality and divine authority can be neither conveyed, transmitted, transferred or whatever by humanly-devised orders. Those in today's Missouri Synod who have resigned the office of the ministry once conferred on them by the election and call of a local congregation - Synodical officials of every description, seminary professors, the hundreds of pulpit-deserters roaming about in and out of Synod who affect all the "ordained minister" trappings when it is to their advantage to do so, shedding them when it's not - all of them must trace their ordination-empowered offices not to Christ or the apostles but, rather, along a line stretching back first to Walther and his contemporaries, then to 19th century Germany, then to Luther and his contemporaries, and, finally, to the early 16th century popes. The office of the ministry of Cleveland Resolution 6-35 is an office whose origin, authenticity and authority emanate from Rome. It's a counterfeit.
Formerly, nothing was allowed to take precedent over the spiritual well-being of the members of the congregations. Everything was ordered with that in mind. It was unwavering commitment to that goal, mandated by the principles embodied in Church and Ministry,that enabled Old Missouri time and time again to experience the blessing of victory when forced to take to the field to defend the truth and purity of God's inerrant Word. (The 1970s Battle for the Bible was won during the immediate post-1962 transition period when the new order was being organized. It would be impossible to gain such a victory today.)
But that's ancient history. Today in New Missouri it is the professional and social welfare of the members of the clergy caste that primarily concerns the hierarchists.This flip-flop is a direct result of the authority of the keys, the authority to forgive sins, being separated from the congregations and turned over to a usurping, papal-oriented, ordination-empowered episcopacy. It is the separation of this authority from the congregations that has served to create the attitude of cynical contempt toward them so evident today within a large segment of the clergy caste.
The contempt serves as a unifying agent. It's the Pilate/Herod thing. Out of our Ft. Wayne seminary come aspiring little popes; out of our St. Louis seminary come crowd-pleasing vaudevillians. Form over function; function over form. A world apart? Not at all. Different players, same team. Add to their number district and national Synodical officials and a whole host of ubiquitous seldom-see-the-inside-of-a-pulpit wannabe-but-don't-wannabes.
(It's enlightening to watch the outcropping - or perhaps I should say outdropping -of this contempt as it exposes itself, most noticeably at our seminaries, and especially our Ft. Wayne seminary where scorn of late seems to have taken a pathological turn. It is here, or so it was reported recently, that the claim was made by an everyone's-favorite-fun-guy professor, speaking before a large gathering, that Old Missouri's congregationalism treats pastors as hired hands while New Missouri's episcopalianism treats them as honored men chosen of God - exactly opposite the reality.
How is it that something a ten year old could be made to understand inside of fifteen minutes cannot be fathomed by men who have more than seven years of higher education? How is it that Old Missouri's divinely-instituted, congregationally-conferred, "highest office (authority) in the church" can be characterized by an eminent, intelligent seminary professor as a hired-hand position and New Missouri's humanly-devised, pastor-by-ordination office be characterized as divine and hundreds of students, former students, Synodical officials and pulpit-deserting hangers-on, sharing the professor's scorn, heartily cheer him, so it was reported, for saying it? One is hard pressed to find words to describe such a reaction, but contempt wallowing in deep abiding ignorance would certainly seem apt.)
Pitted against this unholy alliance are the faithful pastors who in spite of the scorn heaped upon them by their peers remain firmly committed to the Scriptural principles elucidated in Church and Ministry.Standing by are the members of the congregations who, bereft of any knowledge regarding their corporate, God-ordained purpose, authority, and responsibility, have been rendered virtual non-entities, powerless to halt the march down the road to ruin. The result is spiritual disaster. I will site a few examples. Add your own.
Reformed theology and practices spread unimpeded like wildfire through our congregations in every part of the land. Law is turned into gospel, Gospel into Law, directing eyes away from Christ on to self, the satanic nature of it all disguised by huge numbers of followers, resplendent buildings, frenetic activity. Enthusiastically supported by one faction of the "team," the eternal welfare of tens of thousands of our trusting brothers and sisters are placed in jeopardy with no one to turn to for rescue. Even so much as a suggestion of opposition and the episcopal wagons circle in defense of the brotherhood
Tens of thousands of our wives, daughters and sisters have been led like lambs to the slaughter by episcopal-minded judas-goats. Based on the New Missouri anti-Scriptural position that a congregation has no part in the administration of the authority of the keys to forgive sins, that this is the exclusive prerogative of pastors granted to them by Synod through its ordination, they have led these good people to rebel against their God, His order of creation and His restrictions on their activities within a congregation. The rebellion has become universal, all opposition to it is summarily and unceremoniously dismissed, and the most enthusiastic supporters of it are the very ones who in another era were looked to for defense against such rebellion, namely, Synodical officials perched on every level of what has become, in New Missouri, an episcopal ladder.
A natural extension of New Missouri's everyone-a-minister theology, our Mission Board's misguided everyone-a-missionary theology has led to a disastrous confusion of Law and Gospel. Thousands in our congregations are led by the Mission Board to believe that the projects they support are ministries of the Gospel when in fact they are nothing more than make-yourself-feel-good, wholly Law-oriented Peace Corp-style projects. Even more egregious is the way in which those involved in the projects are affected. They are being led away from Christ to self by the very efforts the Mission Board encourages them to believe is the spreading of the Gospel . Besides everything else, the whole sorry mess is a stinging slap across the face of our true missionaries and their wives and children who willingly risk everything to bring the Good News of forgiveness to poor souls who are without hope in this world.
A more recent example of how far we have fallen and how safe it has become under the protection of the episcopacy to openly foster errant theology is the January 2002 issue of the Lutheran Witness,at one time a publication dedicated to theological enlightenment now become one that appears dedicated to dumbing down its readers. The author of its question and answer column tells his questioner that "whether something is Law or Gospel can depend, in a sense, on the one who hears or reads it," and that "the Sermon on the Mount contains both Law and Gospel statements....... consider the Beatitudes." Anyone who finds Gospel in the Beatitudes or any place else in Matthew 5 - 7 is either a Trinity Broadcasting groupie or on his way to Rome. Here we have as an official spokesman for the Missouri Synod a situation ethicist who, going unchallenged, promotes a bankrupt anti-Christian phlisophical tool as a principle of Bible interpretation - and is provided a cover of anonymity to hide behind while doing so. Circle the wagons.
These are merely a few examples that illustrate the ruinous state of affairs in New Missouri today. But they don't tell the worst of it. The following does:
A Ft. Wayne seminary professor wrote this to his students on Reformation Day, 1980: "On March 29, 1971...... I began (a) class period with this remark: 'Genesis 12:3 is the first clear statement in the Old Testament of what we call "objective Justification."' The twenty-three students who were taking this elective course objected almost unanimously. I thought they were kidding. But they told me that there is no such thing as objective justification. I told them that...subjective justification is destroyed if there is no objective justification...I was staggered when they informed me (who) they had learned this from... The next morning I spoke to (the professor)....He told me that our fathers have taught wrongly and that the situation must be corrected."
The wagons circled. His colleagues came out in force to defend him. A group of idolizing laymen joined the fray by publishing the paper he had written on Justification. In it he claimed adherence to the doctrine but denied that Romans 4:24, 25; 5:18,19 and 2 Corinthians 5:19, 21, the chief passages upon which the doctrine is based, teach the doctrine, replacing them with passages that teach subjectivejustification. When the sophistry is peeled away, what is revealed here is a Gospel with it's heart - our Father's forgiveness of all mankind for the sake ofthe perfect life and death of His dear Son, Jesus Christ - ripped out. Christ is gone; only self is left. Justification produces sanctification, sanctification produces good works. If you want to be assured of your salvation, look to your works. Test them to see if they are of a quality one would expect from someone who has the faith necessary for salvation. Assure yourself of salvation, brother! Improve your life! The professor remains on the faculty to this day.
Thirty years later his poison flows everywhere. In a widely reported case a year or so ago, a laymen brought charges of false doctrine against his pastor for denying the objectivity of justification. District officials were called in and after examining the pastor and acknowledging that the charges were justified, declared there was nothing they could do about it since the teaching had now spread widely throughout Synod. We are now at the point where members of the brotherhood are being excused/defended to the bitter end, even at the cost of jeopardizing the eternal welfare of tens of thousands of trusting souls. A congregation can be assailed by no greater catastrophe than that of being saddled with one of these charlatans.
Here's Walther regarding the battle over the doctrine of the church and the ministry: "We are not fighting for a particular constituted division which calls itself Lutheran. The object of our struggle is nothing else than the true faith, the pure truth, the unfalsified Gospel,the pure foundation of the apostles and prophets." (Concordia Theological Monthly;Oct., 1961, pp. 601, 605. Emphasis added.)
When the doctrine of the church and the ministry fails to be preserved from all error, the administration of the Word and the sacraments will ultimately be affected. If the administration is affected so must the power being administered. The power being administered is the forgiveness of sins, the "ministration of righteousness", justification. Once the authority to publicly administer the power of the office of the keys to forgive sins is removed from those to whom God gave it, namely, local congregations of believers, and put into the hands of an exclusive, humanly-devised order of ecclesiastics chaos must always follow with justification the ultimate victim. History is witness to the inevitability of this outcome.
My friends, the source of the chaos that besets New Missouri today may be tucked away in the past, but it is no mystery.
New Missouri: anti-Scriptural, anti-Waltherian; Grabau/Loeheist to the core.
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