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Verbum domini manet in aeternum. The word of the Lord endures forever.
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05 April 2008

Issues, Etc. in a nutshell

In all the ink, or pixels, spilled following the Issues, Etc. cancellation by our beloved synod, the best summary statement of the basis of the whole thing I came across is in a Letter to the Editor in the Wall Street Journal I found quoted on Pastor Esget's excellent confessional Lutheran blog, Esgetology. Read it here:

http://esgetology.blogspot.com/2008/04/truth-as-product-of-church-bylaws.html

While many have seen the cancellation as a shot across the bow of confessional Lutheranism, which I would say is an understatement, it's more like a torpedo amidships, beyond or at least alongside the seeming transition of our church into another "evangelical" denomination in the American contemporary sense from an evangelical church in the Gospel and Reformation sense, the mindset the letter writer identifies is a huge problem all its own, quite apart from the transitioning it serves.

Perhaps it would be better to leave the insight expressed at that. At any rate, my additional comment would be, if we bemoan this transitioning, and we should, we should equally bemoan another transitioning which appears to be in the opposite direction but is in fact the same. That is the Vatican II For Lutherans version of what is supposedly the historic faith and worship.

It makes no difference whatsoever whether one turns to Saddleback and Willow Creek or to 1960s Rome, to reinventing the Gospel through phenomenology and Max Scheler et al. by John Paul II and Benedict XVI or through management and marketing theory and Peter Drucker et al. by Rick Warren and Joel Osteen, to Contemporary Christian Music and its non liturgy or to Vatican II's now universal lectionary and calendar and novus ordo -- neither is faithful to the aims of the Reformation as stated in the Augsburg Confession and the rest of the Book of Concord and both are different ways to the same end of rejecting them.

It would mean nothing if we were to push one out the front door yet let the other in the back. Either way, we have been "transitioned".
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1 comment:

LPC said...

and we should, we should equally bemoan another transitioning which appears to be in the opposite direction but is in fact the same.

Absolutely good point, why, how come nobody picked up on this except you P.E.

Looks like they have been busy looking at trees and forgotten the forrest.

LPC

14 April, 2008 02:01

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