If you are at all plugged into what is going on outside of Lutheran circles, you have undoubtedly seen news related to the surge of thirty-five and under young people (particularly young men) who are coming back to church… or exploring the faith for the first time.

 But they are not just showing up at any church.  These young people have done their homework.  There is no societal or family expectation from their religiously milquetoast parents that they be in church, and a high percentage of their friends are involved in neo-paganism or the various identity categories that serve a religious function in the lives of their adherents.  No, they have come to the end of all that or else they have sensed as much as deducted that something is radically wrong with the world they inhabit. 

When they show up at the doorsteps of the church, they have already “deconstructed” the secular, progressive faith into which they were catechized by both their education and the liturgical cycle of television, YouTube, and social media, for they have experienced its devastating fruits in either their own lives or the lives of those they love.  By the time they warm a pew for the first time, they may know more about the controversy regarding whether and when the exodus happened, the debates at the Council of Nicaea II, or the history of the Reformation than the pastor preaching to them remembers or maybe ever knew.

While they may know they need spiritual formation and are hungry for such, while the pastor or any experienced Christian may quickly discern how partial or narrow their autodidactic catechesis has been, they are mostly not showing up the way people showed up at church a generation ago did.  They are not seeking a vague “spirituality,” to “teach their kids morals,” or “doing what comes naturally” once the halcyon days of their twenties are over and it is time to “settle down.”  They have gagged on the modernist Kool-Aid and are seeking an emetic to get the toxins out of their system.

So, they are seeking out orthodoxy and orthopraxy. To the consternation and frustration of theological progressives everywhere, these people are seeking out Latin mass and Eastern Rite catholic parishes, vital Orthodox congregations, and traditionalist Protestant communities.  Popular YouTube theologian Jordan Cooper has done some reflecting on why such people seem more drawn to Anglicanism than Lutheranism,[1] but I think his reflections miss one key point; Lutheranism defines itself—at least in part—over and against the very thing these young people are looking for… tradition.

Because of our polemical family history (recounted each autumn as Reformation Sunday rolls around), we emphasize theological and Biblical argument rather than the reception of a precious, historical (and so immutable) heritage.

This need not be so.  I am not here proposing that we should downplay our history or heritage, but rather that we should tell the whole story.  The Reformation may have settled upon the material principle of the Reformation as justification by grace alone (sola gratia) through faith alone (sola fide) and the formal principle of the Reformation as revelation through Scripture alone (sola Scriptura), but the hermeneutic principle that brought the Reformers to these conclusions was ad fontes—back to the sources.  The Lutheran Reformation in particular was an attempt to recover what had been lost, restore what had become corrupt, and expose again the foundation upon which all later Christian theology was built.  It does not take much time with the Church Fathers to discover that as they debated the doctrines that would later be deemed the dogmas of the faith, they used the canonical Scriptures to justify their positions.  That must mean that the Scriptures were more fundamentally authoritative than the theologians (however exalted intellectually or hierarchically) who interpreted them… Sola Scriptura.

As Martin Chemnitz pointed out beautifully, the Lutheran Reformation was not ultimately about rejectionof tradition, but rejection of authority that made claims contrary to the canonical Scriptures that were in reality the beating heart of the Christian tradition.

“How may I inherit eternal life?” asked the young rich man of Jesus.  As modern scholarship has clearly shown, the Jews of Jesus’s day did not feel burdened by the Law, not desperate to “earn their salvation” by their obedience to it—that was the peculiar pathology of the Roman Catholicism Luther later encountered.  No, the Jews of Jesus’s time viewed the salvation of the Lord and the means by which they received it (by definition, means of grace) as a precious inheritance to be received from God through their forebears.

Wise Christians should do the same.  A principle of the medieval theology from which Lutheranism sprang was that we—whoever and whenever “we” happen to be—are “dwarves standing upon the shoulders of giants.”  While certainly they were sinners who got some things wrong and whose ideas would consequentially need to be corrected by consulting “the sources” of the Christian tradition (preeminently the Scriptures) just as our descendants will need to correct us, what they passed faithfully far surpassed the mistakes they made. 

While he ended his life in Orthodoxy, Church historian Jaroslav Pelikan was a Lutheran when he penned his most famous line; “Tradition is the living faith of the dead.  Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”  Lutherans should embrace the tradition of which we are a part and honor the theology—and practices—of our forebears in more than words, by inhabiting them, practicing them, and making them our own.

There is more to be said about how traditional congregations (and the kind of people who probably read the Lutheran CORE newsletter) can lean into the evangelism opportunities of this historical moment by “living out loud” as who they actually are, but for now, the chief thing is to remember that at its heart, the Lutheran Reformation is not against the Christian tradition, but receives it as the Lord’s inheritance to His people.

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[1] https://youtu.be/iRXi6rQxTtQ?si=Bpm8A7543EAmuhre

 

“RESIDENT ALIENS: LIFE IN THE CHRISTIAN COLONY”

A video book review by Douglas Schoelles  

Many thanks to Douglas Schoelles, pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana (NALC) and member of the board of Lutheran CORE, for giving us a video review of the book, “Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony” by Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989).  A link to Doug’s review can be found here.  A link to our You Tube channel, which contains reviews of around three dozen books as well as a dozen CORE Convictions videos on various topics related to the Christian faith and life, can be found here. 

Doug writes: “While this book has been out thirty-five years, it is worth the read because the points Hauerwas and Willimon make are more salient than ever.  Congregations will need to see themselves as unique faith communities set apart in our neo-pagan, post-Christian society. Paganism permeates our society, filling our thoughts, converting our youth, and subverting the church.  Efforts to accommodate the society whether with liberals or cultural conservatives is an empty effort to underwrite American societies.  The message of the church is not for ourselves, but for the whole world.  As an incarnation of Christ, our purpose and only significance is a vessel of the Gospel which God uses to bring hope and salvation to the whole world.”

Doug continues: “In our world where loneliness and detachment are epidemic many people are searching for a rooted tradition.  Do we offer that?  ‘With our emphasis on the narrative nature of Christian life, we are saying that salvation is baptism into a community that has so truthful a story that we forget ourselves and our anxieties long enough to become part of that story, a story God has told in Scripture and continues to tell in Israel and the Church’ (Hauerwas & Willimon, p. 59).  As we are baptized to be priests we are commissioned to help people in the name of Jesus, not do-gooders who help people.  We are called to be a community of disciples who believe the gospel and are shaped by it.”

Doug concludes: “The authors did not anticipate some twists of history, but much of what they forecast is spot on.”

 

A concerned member of the ELCA contacted me, asking me to do a review of a new curriculum from Augsburg Fortress’s Sparkhouse. That curriculum is entitled T.B.D.: Think. Believe. Do.  Sparkhouse touts it as their newest youth curriculum.  A blogpost describes T.B.D.

as a new small group series that gives students the tools to articulate, investigate, and test out their beliefs on a broad range of topics that connect to their daily lives. However, the goal isn’t to come away from each series with a settled idea about the topic. Although they might feel more settled than they did before. Instead. T.B.D. focuses on how students think, not just what they think.

https://blog.wearesparkhouse.org/youth-faith-process

Currently, T.B.D. offers six topical courses on Prayer, Sin, Mission, Salvation, and Bible, broken up into four sessions each.  Each session begins with a “Provocative Statement” before moving through three major sections: Think, Believe and Do.  After answering a series of thought provoking questions in their journals, students watch a video and reflect on two Bible Passages.  Following this, they come up with an honest statement of what they believe as individuals and as a group.  Finally, the group brainstorms a low risk way to test out that belief in the following week. 

The Video

In the videos that accompany each session, a young person wrestles with questions about the topic of the session.  This is very interesting.  Like many people today, both young and old, the character in each video turns to the internet, searching for an answer.  As you would expect, answers come from all quarters.  The internet search yields many quotes from the Bible.  Quotes are also given by Luther, Augustine, Calvin, Bonhoeffer, St. Benedict, and other Christian teachers.  Others come from more dubious places, like Bart Ehrman and Richard Dawkins.  This is what you would expect from an internet search.   The character in the video is left with more questions than answers as a result.  Pastors and catechists are very familiar with the kind of idiosyncratic views that people develop from their use of the internet. 

Values Clarification

The question is where to turn.  The answer is more than a little surprising.  After pondering challenging statements, watching the video, and looking up two Bible verses, the students are immediately asked to formulate their own responses to the questions.  The result is something very similar to the kind of “values clarification” that was practiced decades ago.  It’s almost as if the students are told, “You’re on your own.  The Bible is unclear and unreliable.  The Christian tradition is too varied and contradictory.  Who’s to say what is true.  You need to chart your own path.”

As a person who grew up in the 1970s, I am quite familiar with this way of teaching.  I learned to ask open ended questions and to accept the challenge to decide for myself.  Fortunately for me, I had pastors and college professors who pointed me to the answers.  (I attended a Lutheran college.) Otherwise, I would have been lost.  During my senior year of college, the process of asking open questions and deciding for myself overwhelmed me.  I realized that I was drowning in a sea of meaninglessness and purposelessness.  In the midst of this, I became acutely aware of my sinfulness.  It was then that I turned to the things I had learned from my pastors and professors.  In particular, I remembered what I had learned about the Cross and the Resurrection.  If I had been left entirely to my own resources, I don’t know where I would be.

A Third Resource?

In T.B.D., youth are presented with two resources with which to interpret the Bible: 1) the confusing diversity of answers given by the internet and 2) their own wisdom and the wisdom of their peers.   It’s too bad that a third resource is not introduced into the discussion, namely, the wisdom of the Creedal and Lutheran tradition of interpreting the Bible. If the person teaching this curriculum is a pastor or a well catechized lay person, T.B.D. might not be harmful.  The same would be true if it was used with well catechized youth.  As one reads the lesson book and watches the video, it is easy to identify answers to the questions that are raised. 

For instance, in the unit on Prayer, the video character, a young woman, wrestles with the meaning and purpose of prayer.  What does the Bible teach?  How is one to pray?  Does prayer change things?  Why pray if God already knows everything?  As I watched, I thought to myself, “It’s too bad the Lutheran tradition doesn’t have a simple but profound explanation of the meaning of prayer; or even better an explanation of the Lord’s Prayer.”  At one point, the character finds a link to an article on St. Benedict.  She decides to download his daily prayer schedule to her calendar, only to be shocked by the notion that it calls for prayer seven times a day.  Again, I found myself thinking, “Too bad Luther didn’t simplify the seven hours of prayer on behalf of the laity, reducing them to two or three times a day.”   At another point, the character does a search for the Ten Commandments, hoping that there is something there about prayer.  She concludes that the Ten Commandments are no help, since prayer is not mentioned.  As one knows, however, Luther’s interpretation of the Second Commandment has a lot to say about prayer. 

Unanswered Questions

After reflecting on this curriculum, I am left with a final question.  Is the failure to use the catholic and Lutheran tradition a bug or a feature of T.B.D.?  In other words, do the developers of T.B.D. assume that teachers and facilitators will make use of the Great Tradition and the Lutheran Confessions?  Have they simply forgotten to explicitly remind facilitators of these resources?  Or is the intent to encourage students to utilize the widest possible resources, from St. Benedict to Richard Dawkins, to formulate their own system of beliefs?  If so, the result will not be formation in the Christian faith, but instead in an eclectic post-Christian form of spirituality. 

Ironically, I can remember a time when Augsburg Fortress was criticized for being too Lutheran, too Confessional, too heavy in doctrine.  Other publishers, like Group Publishing and Youth Specialties, were preferred because they were more user friendly, more engaging, and more broadly Evangelical.  To see a curriculum that makes such sparse use of the Catechism and the Lutheran Confessions is surprising, and not an improvement.