More Seeds of Discord

Quoted from LW 27:36-37:

The entire epistle gives ample evidence of how disappointed Paul was over the fall of the Galatians and of how often he pounded at them — now with reproof, now with appeals — about the very great and inestimable evils that would follow their fall unless they reconsidered. This care and admonition, so fatherly and truly apostolic, had no effect at all on some of them; for very many of them no longer acknowledged Paul as their teacher but vastly preferred the false apostles, from whom they imagined that they had derived true doctrine rather than from Paul. Finally the false apostles undoubtedly slandered Paul among the Galatians in this way: Paul, they said, was a stubborn and quarrelsome man, who was shattering the harmony among the churches on account of some trifle, for no other reason than because he alone wanted to be right and to be praised. With this false accusation they made Paul detestable in the eyes of many. Others, who had not yet fallen completely away from Paul’s teaching, imagined that there was no harm in disagreeing a little with him on the doctrines of justification and faith. Accordingly, when they heard Paul placing such great emphasis on what seemed to them a matter of such minor importance, they were amazed and thought: “Granted that we have diverged somewhat from Paul’s teaching and that there is some fault on our side, still it is a minor matter. Therefore he should overlook it or at least not place such great emphasis on it. Otherwise he could shatter the harmony among the churches with this unimportant issue.”

If Luther’s description of the situation is correct, would you have allowed Paul to remain an apostle in your church? Hard to say, unless you’ve lived through a similar situation, in which a conscientious teacher of God’s Word is slandered in such a way. It would seem that breaking fellowship with Paul would be a worse evil than enduring the strife that resulted from his “stubborn and quarrelsome” nature. Luther continues:

Paul answers them with this excellent proverbial statement: “A little yeast leavens the whole lump.” This is a caution which Paul emphasizes. We, too, should emphasize it in our time. For the sectarians who deny the bodily presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper accuse us today of being quarrelsome, harsh, and intractable, because, as they say, we shatter love and harmony among the churches on account of the single doctrine about the Sacrament. They say that we should not make so much of this little doctrine, which is not a sure thing anyway and was not specified in sufficient detail by the apostles, that solely on its account we refuse to pay attention to the sum total of Christian doctrine and to general harmony among all the churches. This is especially so because they agree with us on other articles of Christian doctrine. With this very plausible argument they not only make us unpopular among their own followers; but they even subvert many good men, who suppose that we disagree with them because of sheer stubbornness or some other personal feeling. But these are tricks of the devil, by which he is trying to overthrow not only this article of faith but all Christian doctrine.

The controversy over the sacrament is appropriate to consider. It serves as a good basis for comparison and contrast with more recent controversies, in which similar complaints have been made about “insufficient detail” in holy scripture to warrant such “sheer stubbornness.”

In hindsight, we know that the chief question in that controversy was “What does the pastor distribute and the communicants receive in the Sacrament of the Altar?” The sectarians denied “the bodily presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper,” while the Lutherans insisted upon it. Is it true that scripture provides “insufficient detail” to settle that controversy? Not at all, for how could Jesus have answered the question more simply and plainly? “This is My body.”

Granted, not every theological question will have such a simple and plain answer in holy scripture. However, that does not mean that scripture will settle every controverted point. This shows that the theological questions we ask are just as important as the answers we give. For example, there are miles of difference between asking, “What is the office of the ministry of the Gospel?” and asking, “What do we mean by the term ‘office of the ministry’ in relation to the Gospel?” One answer will not be found in scripture. The other might, but the question still suffers from inexactness that will inevitably show up in the answer. Hence, the PMW and its tragic controversy. Some understood the question one way, others understood it another way, while a growing number understand it both ways simultaneously.

Remember doublethink? This is similar. But instead of holding two mutually contradictory propositions to be true (something akin to the Lutheran principle of living with the tension of apparent theological contradictions in scripture), this holds two mutually contrasting senses of an expression to be valid usage, each in its proper context. Its weakness is that the “sense” of an expression is not a matter of doctrine at all, but a matter of the ephemeral usage of language. However, it may be the best hope for the ELS to arrive at some kind of unified confession with regard to the PMW.

Final word from Luther:

To this argument of theirs we reply with Paul: “A little yeast leavens the whole lump.” In philosophy a tiny error in the beginning is very great at the end. This in theology a tiny error overthrows the whole teaching. Therefore doctrine and life should be distinguished as sharply as possible. Doctrine belongs to God, not to us; and we are called only as its ministers. Therefore we cannot give up or change even one dot of it (Matt. 5:18). Life belongs to us; therefore when it comes to this, there is nothing that the Sacramentarians can demand of us that we are not willing and obliged to undertake, condone, and tolerate, with the exception of doctrine and faith, about which we always say what Paul says: “A little yeast, etc.” On this score we cannot yield even a hairbreadth. For doctrine is like a mathematical point. Therefore it cannot be divided; that is, it cannot stand either subtraction or addition. On the other hand, life is like a physical point. Therefore it can always be divided and can always yield something.

Is the sense we impart to the words “This is my body” a matter of doctrine, or of life?

Is the sense we impart to the words “The office of the public ministry of the word” a matter of doctrine, or of life?

In one case, they are the words of holy scripture. In the other, they are not. What difference does that make? I may answer this question in a subsequent post, if it is not answered earlier in a comment.

Yet Another Book… for something completely different

This one is not available yet from our local library, but it’s on my medium-short list for books I’d like to read. It was mentioned on the front page of the Christian News. The author is Dinesh D’Souza, and it’s called The Enemy at Home. Here’s from the book’s web site, revealing an observation that has profound implications for the mission of the Church, specifically for the preaching of the Law which must precede the Gospel.

What has changed in America since the 1960s is the erosion of belief in an external moral order. This is the most important political fact of the past half-century. I am not saying that most Americans today reject morality. I am saying that there has been a great shift in the source of morality. Today there is no longer a moral consensus in American society. Today many Americans locate morality not in a set of external commands but in the imperatives of their own heart. For them, morality is not “out there” but “in here.” While many Americans continue to believe in the old morality, there is now a new morality in America which may be called the morality of the inner self, the morality of self-fulfillment.

Is D’Souza right about this shift in the location of morality, or is he idealizing the past? It would seem closely related to the rise of postmodernism. I’d also like to hear what my self-labeled “liberal” friends think of D’Souza’s reasoning relative to the major thesis of this book.

Daily Devotions for Busy People

(Updated 3 Feb 2009)

In The Lutheran Hymnal and in the Book of Family Prayer there is a schedule of Bible texts that may be used for devotions through the Church Year. From what I can see, its chief advantage is variety. Its disadvantage is convenience. I find it much more convenient to keep a bookmark in the Bible that sits on our living room shelf. Then I can grab that Bible (or the second edition of Concordia that sits nearby) for something to read during breakfast.

In the Evangelical Lutheran Hymnary there is a list of the monthly psalter, which takes the reader through the entire book of Psalms once a month, with readings in the morning and evening. For a few years I had my computer sending out those readings via email. That worked well enough. Someone suggested that I make it available as an RSS feed instead. I never really had the right combination of opportunity, means, and motive, until today.

For a few weeks now, I’ve been producing a bulletin insert for my churches here containing some ideas and helps for use in personal devotion. Included are the readings from both the schedule I mentioned above and from the monthly psalter. That’s also where I list prayer requests, Sunday school lesson themes, and progressive excerpts from the Small and Large Catechisms. It’s a useful little insert, especially for those who can keep one handy through the week. I could do that, but today I realized I can do something else, too.

In the last year or two, I’ve been using an RSS feed aggregator to keep up with a few blogs and news sources. Right now, I’m very satisfied with one called Akregator, which is part of the KDE desktop environment. For those who don’t know what an RSS feed or an aggregator is, here’s a brief (3-paragraph) explanation:

Many web sites have pages or other information that gets updated from time to time. If you want to stay abreast of the information with your web browser, then you’ll have to fire up your browser and tell it to show you that page every time you remember to check for changes. Sometimes, there will be no changes at all, so you will have wasted some time in checking. Sometimes you won’t even remember to check for a while. That inconvenience and wasted time is solved by RSS feeds and aggregators.

An RSS feed can be provided by the web site you want to keep tabs on. It’s a link that shows a machine-readable list of recent changes. Each item in the list of changes can contain a link to the changed information, a comment or description, a bit of audio or video media (then we call it a podcast), and any number of other useful tidbits.

An aggregator (or feed reader) is an inobtrusive program that you keep running on your computer, which periodically checks all the RSS feeds you may be interested in for new information. When it finds something new, it lets you know. The aggregator also provides a way for you to subscribe to new feeds, manage your feeds, and even view the items they contain. Google and other web portals have built-in aggregators, but I prefer one that I can use without a web browser.

So today I decided it’s high time to provide this devotional information in an RSS Feed. Anyone can use it. Each item you fetch from the feed contains a brief description and a link to the devotion text for that time of that day. At 12 PM Pacific, the feed switches from morning devotions to evening devotions. (If you’re in another time zone, there’s not much I can do about it. I don’t think I have access to your tz information when you fetch the feed.) Generally, there are two items in the feed: the devotion text and the psalter reading. Since there are no devotion texts for Sunday, the feed is set to provide Sunday texts from the historic lectionary.

If you already use an aggregator, or if your brower has one built-in, then all you need is the link. You can use either of these:

  • http://www.bethanythedalles.org/devotions.py

  • http://www.concordiahoodriver.org/devotions.py

You may have better success using this Feedburner link. It also works with a plain old webbrowser:

  • http://feeds2.feedburner.com/bethanythedallesDailyDevotions

If your web browser doesn’t know what to do with those, and you don’t have an aggregator, then I suggest that you try out some free ones. You’ll find links from Wikipedia, among other places.