The Plucked Chicken is a blog written by a Confessional Lutheran who happens to be a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod. It is a place to read some thoughts about Christian doctrine. That is, about the teachings of the Bible concerning Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the Savior of every human being.
I intend to reflect upon events in the ELS, in my local congregation, in the news, and upon interesting things from my personal studies. Your responses are welcome. Corrections are expected.
What is a confessional Lutheran? It’s not a Lutheran who has given up everything Roman Catholic except the confessional. The fact is, there is more good in the Roman Catholic Church than the confessional. Of course, even the confessional would need some paleoevangelical repristination. But I digress.
A confessional Lutheran is a Lutheran whose faith is confessed in word and deed, but particularly in the Lutheran Confessions. Not every Lutheran is a Confessional Lutheran. Some are merely social Lutherans, Lutherans of Convenience, Denominational Lutherans, Conservative Lutherans, Liberal Lutherans, or some other kind. A Confessional Lutheran equates Lutheranism with the doctrine of Martin Luther and the other writers of the Lutheran Confessions. This doctrine is important because it’s not really theirs, or mine. It belongs originally to God the Father, and to Jesus Christ, whom He sent to teach it. This is found in John 7 and 8. (The end of John 8 is the Gospel lesson for tommorrow, if your church is observing Judica, the 5th Sunday in Lent.)
More on that later.
You may wonder about the name of this blog: The Plucked Chicken. In 1918, at the organizational synod meeting of the ELS at Lime Creek in Iowa, one of the prominent visitors from the Merger (outside the synod) remarked disparagingly that the new church body seemed like a plucked chicken. You see, the ELS was formed from a tiny, numerically inconsequential minority of pastors and churches that refused to join that Merger of Norwegian Lutheran church bodies in America. Apparently a layman attending the meeting heard the remark and replied, “But if the chicken is healthy, it will grow feathers again.” (See Built on the Rock ISBN 0-9262-4645-3X, p. 69.) That’s what has happened, with God’s blessing.
I pray that the chicken is and remains healthy, because if not, it can lose its feathers and much more. Maybe this blog will help ever so slightly to prevent that.
And so it begins.
The Plucked Chicken: it could well describe the state of many a church congregation too! When God strips a small church down to its basic, constituent parts, one is reminded of Behe’s Mousetrap Analogy with regard to intelligent design: there is irreducible complexity even at the most basic levels of creation (the congregation); without a certain minimum of parts, all having come together at once, the organism cannot function. There may be more comparisons I haven’t thought of.
My best wishes to the life and doctrine and other synonyms of The Plucked Chicken Blog. You should get listed on the Cranach site, or ask Ed Veith to list you on his blogsite. Or I will.
YIC;
Bruce Gee