Gottesblog

The Rev. Zach Zehnder has recently posted this video in which he makes an argument for changing the way we train and form pastors based on his experience as a businessman.

Here is why I think he is wrong.

There are many reasons: historically, liturgically, and also as a general cry for help.

Our Lutheran identity is not merely some kind of tribal identification. Rather, the hymnody from our own tradition confesses our own theology - which is often missing when we borrow hymnody (or even worse, “songs”) from outside of our tradition…

In response to Dr. Eckardt’s advice to seminarians to “Show yourself a man,” a younger pastor disagreed. He said that it would be better to tell them to “Be humble.” I found this perception of incompatibility between manliness and humility illustrative, both of generational disagreement about masculinity, as well as differences as to how we see the office of the holy ministry.

We do not live in the Age of Reason, nor the Age of Aquarius, nor the Information Age. We live in the Age of Bubulum Stercus.

The Paschal Greeting is one of the most ancient Christian traditions by which disciples of the risen Lord Jesus Christ around the world confess and celebrate His glorious resurrection and victory over death.

One of the official publications of one of our LCMS Districts reports that a retired pastor has just been given an honorary doctorate from one of the Concordia universities owing to the fact that under his leadership, his congregation's music "transitioned from the emphasis on traditional music and added a more Gospel oriented genre."

Advocates of church-growth, multiculturalism, and anti-liturgicalism in our midst often resort to the canard that the liturgy is “too European” and our hymns are “too German.“

In wartime, there are always casualties and losses. So it is in the church militant. The Rev. Dr. Peter Scaer offers sobering comments on the sinking of the Australia. Lord, have mercy.

The LCMS is a conservative church body in a conservative confession, grounded in the inerrant Scriptures according to a quia subscription to the Book of Concord. We privilege our fathers in the faith, and look askance at innovation. This is not to say that we never change things, but we are reformers, not revolutionaries.

Worship is the essence of the catholic faith, and we cannot be saved unless we confess it. Our worship is directed solely to the Holy Trinity who is also the Holy Unity. Worship and confession cannot be separated. And indeed, “whoever does not believe” the catholic faith “faithfully and firmly cannot be saved.”

If we don’t “ordain” women because God’s Word forbids us, then we can safely conclude that Satan is driving us toward the practice as a subversion of our biblical confession. And why would he not? We’ve seen church body after church body fall into this practice - followed up swiftly by embracing homosexuality and other sexual deviancies.

We in the LCMS - and other conservative church bodies - insist on the traditional practice of male-only ordination.

There are three explanations for this, moving from right, to moderate, to left:

The Gottesdienst, the Divine Service, the Mass as we practice it in our Evangelical Catholic post-Reformation liturgy in our Lutheran tradition, is a balance between both Word and Sacrament. Our LSB hymnal presents it as such: the Service of the Word (pages 186-193) and the Service of the Sacrament (pages 194-202).

The conventional wisdom is that Jesus mainly spoke Aramaic, and that the New Testament was only written in Greek in order for the Gospel’s spread among the Gentiles. In his 2015 book, Did Jesus Speak Greek?: The Emerging Evidence of Greek Dominance in First-Century Palestine, author Dr. G. Scott Gleaves explains how he began to question this “Aramaic Hypothesis” that Aramaic was the “dominant language” in first century Palestine.

And we’re not talking about a little grant here or there to upgrade security or help rebuild a roof after a storm. We are talking about millions of dollars in tax money running the organization. LSI isn’t a little milk-and-cookie outfit that supplies VBS materials to churches. It boasts “more than 500 employees and an operating budget of $32 million.”

When people really, really want something that violates Scripture or the Confessions, they become desperate to gainsay the passages that they don’t want to submit to. They find clever ways to work around them.

In the past, the assumption was that young people wanted something new, something that rejected the old, something that broke away from history and heritage and formality. But today’s youth culture is different.