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 We Confess

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THE CHURCH

We Confess Series, Volume 3

Hermann Sasse

Translated by Norman Nagel

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations in this publication are from the Revised
Standard Version of the Bible, copyrighted 1946, 1952, © 1971, 1973 by the Division of
Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and
used by permission.
Quotations marked KJV are from the King James or Authorized Version of the Bible.

Quotations marked NKJV are from The New King James Version, copyright © 1979,
1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., publishers.
Unless otherwise indicated, the Lutheran Confessions are quoted from The Book of Con-
cord, translated and edited by Theodore G. Tappert, copyright © 1959, Fortress Press.
Used by permission.
Passages quoted from volumes 33, 37, 38, 41, 54 of Luther’s Works, © 1972, 1961, 1971,
1966, 1967 by Fortress Press, are used by permission.
The hymn “Lord Jesus Christ, Will You Not Stay?” is from Lutheran Worship. Text: ©
1982, Concordia Publishing House. Used by permission.
Translated by permission from the original German. The two sermons (the first and last
selections) were published in Zeugnisse: Erlanger Predigten und Vortrdge vor Gemeinden
1933—1944, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Hopf, © 1979 Martin Luther-Verlag Erlangen. The
essays “Article VII of the Augsburg Confession and the Present Crisis of Lutheranism,”
“Ministry and Congregation,” and “Apostolic Succession” appeared in In Statu Confes-
sions: Gesammelte Aufsdtze von Hermann Sasse, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Hopf, Vol. 1
© 1966 Lutherisches Verlagshaus Berlin und Hamburg.

Copyright © 1986 Concordia Publishing House

3598 South Jefferson Avenue, St. Louis, MO 63118-3968
Manufactured in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy-
ing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Concordia Publishing
House.

123 45 67 8 9 10 MAL 95 94 98 92 91 90 89 88 87 86
 Contents

Translator’s Preface
JESUS INTERCEDES FOR HIS CHURCH
(1941/42) 11

ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

(July/August 1960)
ARTICLE VII OF THE AUGSBURG CONFESSION
IN THE PRESENT CRISIS OF LUTHERANISM
(April 1961) 40

MINISTRY AND CONGREGATION

(July 1949) 69

APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION
(April 1956)
LAST THINGS: CHURCH AND ANTICHRIST
(March 1952)
THE CHURCH LIVES!
(June 27, 1943)
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 Translator’s Preface

We begin and end with Sasse preaching. His preaching and theology
are all of one piece, and he was no trimmer. There are things of first
importance and others that are not, and Sasse is of enormous help in
telling the difference. “Each sermon is more important than all those
sessions which spend their time discussing big church resolutions re-
garding the Bonn constitution, the atom bomb, or Goethe’s 200th birth-
day.”
Dr. Sasse was a churchman, not a statesman. He did not market
his message according to the mood of the moment or yesterday’s social
survey. He knew and loved the church and her history too profoundly.
We do not invent or direct the church. We are to preach what we have
been given to preach, “the forgiveness and justification of sinners for
Christ’s sake.”
For His church Christ prays. The church can no more be destroyed
than Christ can be destroyed. With this confidence it is possible to face
squarely what would destroy the church. Most damaging are the attacks
from within, the subversion of the Gospel to the uses of power to make
of the church a political force, ruled by the decisions of men. Such de-
cisions may claim episcopal, synodical, papal, presbyterial, or congre-
gational authority. No claim holds except it be of Christ, the Holy Spirit,
and His Scripture.
Two sermons and five letters are what we have in this book, with
their matter rather than their dates determining the sequence. The
dates, however, are important, and with them Sasse’s specific message.
The first sermon was preached to a small congregation celebrating the
anniversary of the dedication of its church. It was during the war, when
the comforting message that “Jesus prays for His church” was partic-
ularly needed.
The letter on the Holy Spirit was written after Sasse had been in
Adelaide 11 years. His grasp of the intimate connection between the
doctrine and the history of the church, which had thrilled the packed
lecture hall in Erlangen, moved deeper to the intimate connection be-
tween the believer and Christ, His Spirit, and His church. Sasse grieved
for the loss of students, so gifted, so promising, killed in the war. With
faith’s “nevertheless” he carries forward the work of one of the most
brilliant of his students, “meaninglessly” killed in the war. He tells us
the name, and speaks of those too whose names are known only to the
Lord, “ ... somewhere in China.” God the Holy Spirit “brings the
uncompleted work to completion.”
Dr. Sasse was above all a confessional theologian, and therefore
confessing the faith was of the greatest importance for him. So it is
fitting that we hear what he has to say about the relevance of the Augs-
burg Confession’s famous Article VII (“The Church”) for the worldwide
Lutheran Church of today.
In the 19th century the great Lutheran churchmen Walther and
Léhe were unable to agree on the doctrine of church and ministry and
therefore sadly went their separate ways. In Australia Dr. Sasse was
able to bring together the two streams of Lutheranism which might be
characterized as emanating from these two theological giants. His letter
on “Ministry and Congregation” is an effort toward the same conjunction
in America. Although we know the subsequent sad history, this does
not rob the letter of its importance.
When our confidence does not live from what has been given to the
church, then we are tempted to add things to make it more sure. Sasse
gives the history of the notion of apostolic succession, and its roots in
men’s efforts to guarantee the church. He recalls us to the grounds of
confidence which alone finally hold.
In light of this the final letter, “Last Things: Church and An-
tichrist,” speaks for itself. There are facts to be faced, documented, and
honestly dealt with “in these last days.” There are confessional tasks
that may not be shirked.
Sasse was a confessor involved. In 1927 he played a leading role in
the World Conference on Faith and Order in Lausanne. When the Nazis
kept his passport, he could no longer carry forward this involvement.
He was a leading theologian involved in working toward Barmen. But
in the night of May 30, 1934, he left Barmen when he was denied the
opportunity to speak on the morrow. Those who were arranging things
did not wish to hear him further (Die lutherischen Kirchen und die
Bekenntnissynode von Barmen, ed. W. Hauschild, p. 98).
After the war, finding the confessional situation of Lutheranism in
Germany most deplorable, He left Erlangen and eventually accepted-a
call to Immanuel Seminary in Adelaide, Australia, where he continued
to write his “Letters to Lutheran Pastors.” There are points in them
where pain, anger, and passion burn through. Then it is well to remem-
ber that only as sinners forgiven for Christ’s sake can any of us carry
on our work. There is something to trouble everyone in Sasse. This can
be avoided by simply ignoring him, or by listening only when he agrees
with us. To listen when he says unwelcome things may prove most
fruitful. This is not to say that he is always right, as neither are any of
us. Rather it points to his helpfulness in drawing us into always deeper
probing, testing, and appropriation of Christian truth.
Sasse’s last words to us in this volume are from the pulpit. “When
the day comes when this war is over. . . ” Ina situation in which there
appeared to be nothing but doom, he preached about the ongoing true
life of the church. He proclaimed: “Nations pass away, but the church
continues . . . because the future of the church is the future of Jesus
Christ. Amen.”
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 JESUS INTERCEDES
FOR HIS CHURCH
A sermon on John 17:6—23 during the war (1941/42)
for the anniversary of the dedication
of a church and a meeting
of the Martin Luther Bund

How inexhaustible the abundance of Holy Scripture! There are texts

there that a man could spend his whole life studying without exhausting
their depths. Yes, the labor of many centuries on the part of Christen-
dom is required to understand such passages fully. For 1,500 years the
church read the epistles of the apostle Paul to the Romans and the
Galatians. Faithful Christians were nourished by them in the church
service. They were explored by profoundly learned men, from the an-
cient church fathers to the masters of medieval theology. Then after 15
centuries the hour came when the depths of their doctrine of justification
were laid bare in the Reformation.
Perhaps something similar may happen with the great texts of the
Bible which speaks of the divine mystery of the church: the Epistle of
Paul to the Ephesians, and this great 17th chapter of the Gospel Ac-
cording to St. John. August Vilmar, the great Lutheran theologian of
the 19th century, repeatedly expressed the hope that out of the severe
struggles of the church, out of what Christians were living through in
his day, there might grow a full understanding of what the New Tes-
tament says of the church. If this could be learned, he said, such a new
understanding of the Third Article might be as great a turning point in
the history of the church as was the new understanding of the Second
Article in the Reformation.
Our celebration today of the anniversary of the dedication of this
church gives us the opportunity to ponder and probe what our text says
of the mystery of the church. This is given us as we stand engaged in
a great struggle for the sake of the church. Your house of God has stood
here now for more than 30 years. Compared with the age of other
churches that is a very short time.

11
 Our text speaks to us about the miracle of the church’s preservation.
The preservation of the church is no smaller miracle than its founding,
just as the preservation of the world is no smaller miracle than its
creation. It is by no means self-evident that the church should continue.
In whole regions of the world it has almost or completely gone under.
Many a people among whom there was a flourishing church has rejected
this church. There is no sadder sight than the ruins of old churches,
such as may be seen in parts of Asia which have sunk back into hea-
thenism.
No lesser man than Martin Luther reckoned with the possibility
that the church might one day be taken from our people. “God’s Word
and grace is like rain which falls on one place and then goes on to fall
on another, not returning again to where it once was before.” He pointed
to those lands which once were a part of ancient Christendom but which
sank back again into heathenism, and he spoke the warning: “You Ger-
mans must not imagine that it will be yours forever. Unthankfulness
and scorn of it will not let it remain.”
No, it is not self-evident that the church will remain where it once
has been. To the whole church of Christ the promise is indeed given
that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, but this is not something
that any congregation or particular church can say of itself. Just as an
individual Christian may fall away, so also whole congregations, whole
parts of the church, may fall away. We can read of this already in the
New Testament.
No, it is not self-evident that the church will abide. That was known
also by Him who speaks in our Gospel: Jesus Christ, the Lord, in the
night in which He was betrayed. What He said to His disciples in that
farewell night He now says once more. But He does not say it to men,
but to His heavenly Father.
The final care that moves Him is His care for His church. His work
on earth is completed. “I have manifested Thy name to the men whom
Thou gavest Me out of the world.” “ I have given them the words which
Thou gavest Me.” “I have given them Thy Word.” And this Word was
not without fruit. “They have kept Thy Word.” “They have received [it]
and know in truth that I came from Thee; and they have believed that
Thou didst send Me.” And this faith held. “While I was with them I
kept them in Thy name. . . . I have guarded them, and none of them is
lost but the son of perdition, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.”
“While I was with them”—as long as that was the case there was no
need to worry about the future of the Gospel. But now that He is coming

12
to the Father, Jesus says: “I am no more in the world, but they are in
the world.”
Now, however, they would no longer hear His lovely voice or look
into His eyes. What would become of them? Never has such a task been
given to men as was given to the apostles by their Lord at His farewell.
To this little flock, the Eleven, a responsibility was given such as was
never laid on any others. “As Thou didst send Me into the world, so I
have sent them into the world.”
Should they fail, what would then become of the Gospel? And were
they really the men who were equal to this task? “Then all the disciples
forsook Him and fled”; so we are told about their behavior that same
night (Matt. 26:56). “I do not know the man”; so said Simon Peter (Matt.
26:72), the same Peter who made the first confession and whom Jesus
therefore called blessed (Matt. 16:17). To such men as these the great
work is entrusted which Jesus leaves behind: “As the Father has sent
Me, even so I send you” (John 20:21).
Yes, it is these feeble men whom He sends, men who do not have
any more faith than any of us. They are men who do not possess the
natural gifts that would be necessary to win the hearts of humankind.
And He sends them into a world that does not want to know anything
about them or their message. “And now I am no more in the world, but
they are in the world.” “And the world has hated them because they
are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” That world will
not take long to finish them off! If the world can nail Him to the cross,
won't it be able to dispose of this handful of men?
Jesus sees that all quite clearly. How could He have any illusions
about His disciples—especially in that night? In that situation He does
one thing: He prays for them. “I am praying for them; I am not praying
for the world but for those whom Thou hast given Me, for they are
Thine.” “Holy Father, keep them in Thy name, which Thou hast given
Me, that they may be one, even as We are one.” “I do not pray that
Thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldst keep
them from the evil one.” “Sanctify them in the truth. . . that they also
may be consecrated in truth.”
Jesus prays for them. He moves from farewell discourse with His
disciples to farewell prayer. Now He speaks no more to men but to His
heavenly Father. Here in this great chapter of the Gospel According to
John we have the greatest of all prayers. Here it is not a mere man
who is praying—no human being can pray it after Him. Here prays the
eternal Son. All other prayers are prayers of men to God, prayers of

13
creatures to their Creator. But this one prayer is prayed by the eternal
Son to the Father. He, the High Priest, utters it for His church. He
who is on the way to Golgotha, He speaks it: “For their sake I consecrate
Myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth.” And He does not
think only of His apostles. Rather He looks further than the farthest
times of the church’s history, over all generations, over all the centuries
to the end of the world: “I do not pray for these alone, but also for those
who will believe in Me through their word” [NKJV]. He prays for the
preservation of the church. And this prayer is heard. That is the secret
of the church’s preservation.
We will understand this better if we ponder what is the meaning
of intercession in our lives—or what it should be. There is nothing that
so holds and carries our children as the intercession we make for them.
There also is nothing that more deeply binds parents and children to-
gether. There would be far less anxiety about our children if we would
lay all our cares for them on the father heart of God. There is nothing
that so binds husband and wife together, that so helps them bear each
other’s burdens, as the intercessions they make for each other.
There also is nothing in the church which so binds its members
together as interceding for one another. When for years on end the
apostle Paul sat in prison while his mission congregations were left
without protection, helpless in the world, there yet remained this one
thing that he could do for them: “For this reason I bow my knees before
the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named
...” (Eph. 3:14-15). This prayer broke through the walls of the prison,
and bound the apostle and his congregations together.
Therefore we make intercession in the church also for our people
and government, for all who are in need and temptation, for the sick
and the dying, for the church of God throughout the whole world. We
remember our brethren in the diaspora. We think of the Lutheran
Church of Brazil, which has such close ties with the Martin Luther Bund
and our church here in Franconia. We recall our German brothers in
Australia, who have remained such faithful friends of the old homeland
because the Lutheran Church has preserved the German language for
them through the Bible, the Catechism, the hymnbook, and the liturgy.
We think of those isolated Germans who today bow their knees with us
in villages in the Kirgiz Republic [of the Soviet Union] or in the forests
of Siberia. We remember all brethren in the faith, including the mis-
sionaries in prison. Today, when we are separated from them by more

14
than land and ocean, and can no longer give them any external help,
we know what is the power of intercession.
If that is so of the intercession which we human beings make for
one another here on earth, how much more powerful is that intercession
which the Head of the church makes for His members. His prayer will
truly and certainly be heard. He prays for us. “I have prayed for you
that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32). That prayer rescued Peter.
“T do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe
in Me through their word” [NKJV]. In this prayer we too are included,
you and I and every Christian who sets his entire confidence on Jesus
Christ as his Savior.
Christ prays for us, and His prayer is heard. This comes to expres-
sion in the liturgy when, before the Collect, we chant: “The Lord be
with you”—and then the response, “And with your spirit.” [We are
saying:] “May the Lord be with you as you now pray—and may He be
with your spirit as you now speak out our prayer.” Jesus Christ is
praying along with us. The church prays together with her Head. And
this prayer is heard “through Jesus Christ, our Lord.”
He prays for us. He prays for His church on earth. This is the
miracle of the church’s preservation. Hear Luther’s confession of this
fact:
It is not we who are able to maintain the church, nor could those
before us, nor will those who come after us be able to do so. It is only
He who says, “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” It
has always been He, is He now, and will always be He. As it is written
in Heb. 18, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for-
ever.” And Rev. 1, “... who is and who was and who is to come.”
He is the Man. That is His name, which belongs to no other man, nor
may it be given to any other.

Oh, if one could only believe this! Oh, if we would but learn some-
thing from this great and childlike trust of Luther’s! How much less
would cares for the church oppress us if we would only cast all our cares
upon Him who has taken the care of the church upon Himself. How
differently we would then do what He bids us do for the sake of the
preservation of His church.
Only when we have this great faith in Him who wondrously pre-
serves His church, only then do we know how the church is sustained.
How is the church on earth sustained? “Sanctify them in the truth; Thy
Word is truth.” “Through the Word the church was brought into exist-
ence; through the Word the church is preserved.” So Luther once said.

15
 As the Word founded the church—“I have given them Thy Word’”—
so the Word of Christ preserves the church. Not the most brilliant of
human organizing, not the most splendid liturgy, not the wisest of men,
not the most splendid church buildings preserve the church. It is done
by the Word alone, by the plain Word of the Gospel as the saving mes-
sage of the forgiveness of sins. “Fruitful ethics can be found also in
Confucianism, a resplendent hierarchy also with the Dalai Lama, sci-
entific theology also in the synagogue, a battle against alcohol also among
the Turks, and a youth movement also in Moscow—forgiveness of sins
alone with Jesus Christ.”
The Word of forgiveness which only Jesus Christ can speak, because
it is He who has borne the sin of the world, the Word of forgiveness
His church is to speak as it follows Him—that is the Gospel. And it is
this Word that creates the unity of the church, the unity of all the
children of God. “Where this article remains pure and active, there the
church remains in fine unity. Where this article does not remain pure
there is no defense against a single error or any Enthusiasm.” Therefore
take care that this may be the case!
In our care for those in the diaspora we have learned that everything
depends on the Word, on the pure proclamation of the Gospel. That is
the greatest service we can perform for the preservation of the church.
Father Lohe was much mocked and resisted in his day when he began
his great work for those in the diaspora by training messengers in the
pure doctrine. The congregations he founded in America have to this
day remained watchmen of the Gospel. In this way we also belong to
the great communion of the church of all ages, along with the fathers
who made confession before us, along with the teachers of the church,
along with the apostles—“. . . that they may be one. . . I in them and
Thou in Me.”
To know this is to know something of the church. The time will
come when the Third Article of the Creed will be understood. The ques-
tion of the church will be one of the great questions of the future. What
a blessed secret this article of faith contains, what a miracle God’s church
is—all this can only be known by those who themselves are among those
for whom Jesus Christ prayed: “Holy Father, keep them in Thy name,
which Thou hast given Me. . . . Sanctify them in the truth; Thy Word
is truth.”
And so we then pray to Him: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on
us. You are the Deliverer of Your church, the Savior of Your body.
Amen.”

16
 ON THE DOCTRINE
OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
Letters to Lutheran Pastors, No. 51
July/August 1960

This letter should have arrived for Pentecost—but then in the church
it is always Pentecost, or should be. Every Sunday is not only an Easter
day but also a little Pentecost. So perhaps my greetings to you are not
too late. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which will engage us here, lies
behind all the questions and all the needs of the church and the holy
ministry which concern us day by day. As we ponder several dogmatic
and historical questions in regard to this doctrine, may it be of help to
us all.

1
“The true doctrine of the Holy Spirit has no place to call its own in
the church and congregation. It appears to have become a foreign body.
This state of affairs must be recognized quite objectively.” With these
words Otto Henning Nebe began his thesis (Habilitationsschrift) for the
University of Erlangen, Deus Spiritus Sanctus (Beitrage zur Férderung
christlicher Theologie, Band 40, Heft 5, 1939). He was one of our most
promising young doctors of theology but was killed in the war. His small
but thoughtful document has not received the attention it deserves.
Even so, we should not ignore the warning given with these opening
words of his.
If indeed the true doctrine of the Holy Spirit has lost its place
(Heimatrecht) in church and congregation, then it cannot be long before
the reality of the Holy Spirit is also lost to us, just as Christ ceases to
be present when He is not truly taught, when His Gospel and sacraments
are falsified. Here may lie the explanation of the decline of those means
in the church which are to be the specific locations of the activity of the
Holy Spirit.
Think of the needs of the office of the ministry! How can we explain
the shortage of pastors in so many churches of every confession? Why

17
do those young men who in other times would have become pastors now
turn to secular callings? Why do pastors now find that their office has
become a problem—and not only in Germany, where everything be-
comes a problem? How are we to explain the high number of nervous
breakdowns among Protestant pastors that are reported to be happening
in America? How are we to explain the increasing number of women
pastors in the Protestant world—and the theological incompetence, even
among Lutherans, in giving an answer to this comparatively simple
problem, when every confirmand knows the answer?
We are all aware of the demands and pressures laid on our office.
In churches nowadays the pastor has to do so many things which do not
really belong to his office, that he scarcely has time for his real office,
“the ministry of teaching the Gospel and administering the sacraments”
[Augsburg Confession V; Tappert, p. 31]. In Germany I knew super-
intendents and deans who were so frazzled by the work of the week
that only on Saturday evening did they finally come to sermon prepa-
ration.
We hear something of this already in an article by August Vilmar
in 1849, entitled “Power over the Spirits.” He spoke of where all this
would lead, all this external business, all the meetings of church groups,
all this having to get the money together. Deacons are to have the
responsibility for such things. They are not to draw a pastor away from
what he is called to do as a pastor. Vilmar preached to deaf ears, this
great pastor of pastors, for whom a consistorialized church had no place.
The process of the secularization of the holy ministry was not halted by
all the rethinking of the nature of the office after World War I, nor even
by the Church Struggle (Kirchenkampf) in Germany. In pondering all
this we may catch a glimpse of what a church still knows of the activity
of the Holy Spirit.
What is happening with the holy ministry shows what is wrong with
us. We seek the Holy Spirit where He is not to be found. We no longer
find Him where He would be found. We speak of Him, but our faith in
Him, in His deity, in His divine Person, has grown weak, or has even
been lost. If things continue to go on like this, the outcome for our
church is only too clear.

2
We modern Christians seek the Holy Spirit where He is not to be
found. In doing this we are, however, certainly not the first. This is a

18
danger which has always been there since the days of the apostles, and
ever and again there have been Christians, indeed whole churches, that
have fallen victim to it. In the second century there was Montanism.
The question which then deeply troubled Christianity and divided it was
whether it was actually the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who was re-
vealing Himself in the new prophesyings. We may recall the spiritualistic
Franciscans in the Middle Ages, the Enthusiast movements of the
Schwdrmer against whom Luther had to battle, and in our day the
various Pentecostal movements. Earnest Christians have often felt com-
pelled to admit what leading men in the Fellowship Movement, who
once acknowledged the Pentecostal Movement’s speaking in tongues,
which had gone on since 1905, came to recognize: It was not the Holy
Spirit.
We are now not speaking of this danger, but of the frivolous manner
in which we in the modern world speak of the experience of the Holy
Spirit. The roots of this are in the English Enthusiasm of the 17th
century and in the Pietism and Methodism of the 18th century. When
at the Berlin Kirchentag of 1853 in a profoundly untruthful declaration
the participants declared themselves loyal to the Augsburg Confession
“with heart and mouth,” but also with the reservation that the unity of
the confession they were making was not to be injured by the differing
views on its Article X that were held by the Lutherans, the Reformed,
and those from Union churches, this uniting of Evangelical Germany
was regarded by many as a work of the Holy Spirit. It has become
almost customary at great church gatherings, and also at the big ecu-
menical gatherings, to perceive and solemnly proclaim the blowing of
the Holy Spirit. A sort of new Pentecost is experienced in the singing
of great hymns in many languages. We need to consider the mass psy-
chology which is going on in such big gatherings, especially at a time
when the world’s techniques for manipulating a crowd and its modern
communications media are penetrating the church.
What is said here is not spoken against getting things organized as
such, nor against the way news can now go round the world, nor against
the means of communication provided by modern technology. Of such
things Vilmar already observed that they are there not only for the
children of this world, but are also to be brought into the service of
Christ’s church. But we are asking whether we are always aware that
there can be mass psychoses also in the church. When the church does
take for its use the techniques which can control or lead a crowd of

19
people, then there is the most urgent need to pray for that great gift
of grace, the discerning and the testing of the spirits.
We seek the Holy Spirit where He is not to be found when we take
it as self-evident that the way our church is developing is altogether
due to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This is not only Rome’s great
error; it is an error found also in other churches. The “Message” of the
Lambeth Conference of 1958 begins with the statement that the bishops
there assembled wished to share with all members of their church in
the world the experience “which has come to us, in a fresh and wonderful
way, by the power of God’s Spirit among us.” “We ourselves have been
knit together by the Holy Spirit in mutual understanding and trust.”
“Because we ourselves have been thus drawn together, God has given
us a message of reconciliation for the Church and the world.” This mes-
sage then begins with the statement: “A divided Church cannot heal
the wounds of a divided world.” Then God is thanked “that in Asia and
Africa, as well as in Britain and America, Christian Churches are ac-
tively moving towards a greater measure of unity” (Report, pp. 1, 29).
There is then nothing to wonder at in the answer given at a press
conference by an Anglican bishop. He was asked why the Lambeth
Conference, which had previously rejected birth control, had now ap-
proved it. He answered that it was by the guidance of the Holy Spirit!
At Lambeth, then, the Holy Spirit is said to have confirmed the Anglican
understanding of the church as well as the unionism in India and Amer-
ica. What has happened here to the Biblical: “It has seemed good to the
Holy Spirit and to us .. .” [Acts 15:28]? The same miracle is said to
have occurred at the Barmen synod in 1934, where Karl Barth’s Be-
kenntnisunion was approved, and the Lutherans, the Reformed, and
those of the Union churches declared that “they sought a common mes-
sage for the need and temptation of the church in our day. With gratitude
to God they surely believe that a common message has been put into
their mouth” (Schmidt II, 92; Cochrane, The Church’s Confession Under
Hitler, p. 237). What has happened here to “Behold, I have put My
words in your mouth” (Jer. 1:9; ef. Deut. 18:18)?
What Luther has to say about all this may be found in the Smaleald
Articles:
All this is the old devil and the old serpent who made enthusiasts of
Adam and Eve. He led them from the external Word of God to spir-
itualizing and to their own imaginations, and he did this through other
external words. . . . In short, enthusiasm clings to Adam and his des-
cendants from the beginning to the end of the world. It is a poison

20
 implanted and inoculated in man by the old dragon, and it is the source,
strength, and power of all heresy, including that of the papacy and
Mohammedanism” (SA III, VIII, 5 and 9).

“Tt is the source, strength, and power . . . of the papacy.” It is a

very serious question, if we really have to choose among the Enthusi-
asms which go on among Christians, whether the Roman one is not
perhaps the lesser evil. Rome’s decisions are at least based on thorough
and learned consultation, and they let the ancient doctrine stand.

3
We seek the Holy Spirit where He is not to be found when we take
it as self-evident that He has to come with every sermon we preach.
God’s Word indeed has the promise: “It shall not return to Me empty”
[Is. 55:11]. But we must always ask ourselves whether what we preach
is in fact God’s Word. When the sermon is a true exposition of the
Scriptural text, then, in spite of all our weakness, God’s Word is
preached. But how many sermons are preached, also in Lutheran
churches, where the Gospel is not taught fully and clearly!
We seem to suppose that it is enough to train young men for four
or five years. They pass their examinations more or less adequately.
They are ordained and sent to some field of service. They may gather
some people who do not belong to any church, but who are interested
in religious questions. These then form a congregation that receives the
rights of a Lutheran congregation without understanding the Catechism
or the Augsburg [Link] same thing happens in the European
churches. Young candidates equipped with Bultmann’s theology are sent
to the sprawling suburbs of our large cities. Or they are sent into the
country, where the farmers and laborers may be fortunate enough not
to understand what the young man believes, or does not believe. Do we
really suppose the Holy Spirit will all by Himself build a church and
congregation there? He can of course make use of such instruments too.
“The Word of God is not fettered” (2 Tim. 2:9), and many a pastor has
been brought to the Gospel by his congregation. Many who did not
understand the Gospel and the sacraments have learned in the desert
of their own theological existence what the university did not teach
them. But that such things happen in the mercy of God does not relieve
us of having to be quite clear about what kind of a proclamation it is to
which the promise has been given that through it the Holy Spirit comes
to the souls of men.

21
 Finally, we seek the Holy Spirit where He is not to be found, when
we overlook the fact that while the Holy Spirit is indeed given in correct
preaching, He does not always create faith, but only “where and when
it pleases God.” This is the teaching of the Augsburg Confession (Art.
V, 2 [Tappert, p. 31]). It is not changed by the fact that under Barth’s
influence the “where and when it pleases God” has been misunderstood
as though it meant that the Holy Spirit has not bound Himself to the
Word and that God’s freedom consisted in this, that He makes the
preached or written Word into the Word of God for one person but not.
for another. [Thence the view that it 7s not the Word of God, but may
become the Word of God.] Against this we must hold firmly that the
external Word of Scripture and correct Scriptural preaching always
brings the Holy Spirit. But we must never forget the other truth, that
the Holy Spirit does not always work faith. This is the freedom of God
the Holy Spirit which Article V of the Augsburg Confession teaches.
The doctrine of grace of the Reformers is a measurement of how
far modern Protestantism has fallen away from the Reformation. What-
ever their differences were in the doctrine of election, Luther and Calvin
were agreed that it simply does not lie within the power of man to accept
the grace of God or not. Already in the 17th century “by grace alone”
(sola gratia) began losing ground among the Reformed (Arminianism)
and Lutherans (election intuitu fidei, “in view of a person’s believing
later on”). How deeply this new form of synergism had penetrated the
Lutheranism of the 19th century is evidenced by the failure to recognize
even today what was at stake in the controversy over the election of
grace, in which the Missouri Synod in America contended for sola gratia
as confessed by Luther. The optimism and synergism prevalent in Amer-
ica have made such inroads into American Lutheranism that the Augs-
burg Confession’s “where and when it pleases God” has for practical
purposes been given up.
Evidence of this is the uncritical taking over of ideas and programs
of stewardship and evangelism from such groups as the Seventh Day
Adventists. The pastor schools his people so that with the right kind of
pious talk they will then be equipped to win other people for the church.
In place of the office of preaching reconciliation comes the training of
“soul winners,” teaching them just the right way of talking with people,
to make maximum use of the techniques of psychological manipulation.
The system admittedly derives from the methods of American business.
Thus people are to be brought into the church, made to feel at home
there, be led to make a decision, and then all together they are to carry

22
on their building of the kingdom of God. What the Word of God is no
longer trusted to do is achieved with the psychological techniques of
such modern evangelization. There is of course talk of the Holy Spirit,
but one no longer knows who He is. It seems He can be measured and
quantified. Such evangelism produces results. Thousands are won for
church membership. On the other hand we may recall the failure of the
Biblical prophets and of our Lord Himself. When one considers the
latter, one begins to understand the full earnestness of the “where and
when it pleases God.” Jesus said: “. . . so that they may indeed see but
not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should
turn again, and be forgiven” (Mark 4:12; cf. Is. 6:9-10). Whoever is not
awed by what is hidden deep in these words will never truly know the
Holy Spirit.

4
We modern people no longer find the Holy Spirit where He would
be sought. This has been true to a certain extent throughout the church’s
history, ever since the days when it was necessary for Paul to teach the
church in Corinth that the quiet workings of the Holy Spirit are His
greatest ones. But it is especially true of us, who no longer understand
the bond of the Holy Spirit with the external means of grace and perhaps
do not even want to hear of it anymore.
Article V of the Augsburg Confession states: “Condemned are the
Anabaptists and others who teach that the Holy Spirit comes to us
through our own preparations, thoughts, and works without the external
word of the Gospel.” Now the spiritualizers, no matter of what period,
will surely deny that they seek to get the Spirit by their own preparation
and works. But they deceive themselves. The “preparation” is an es-
sential part of such “spiritual” experience, and involves some doing on
the part of man. This may be observed in the directions given by the
great masters of mysticism, in the way a Quaker meeting waits in holy
silence, or in Thomas Miinzer’s self-chosen cross by which he would
compel the inner word to come.
Luther saw all this with remarkable clarity, as may be seen in his
classic statement on “Confession” in the Smalcald Articles [III, VIII;
Tappert, pp. 312—13]. The Spirit cannot be separated from the Word,
just as in Holy Scripture logos and pneuma cannot be separated, al-
though one must distinguish between them. As the eternal Word and
the Spirit of God were involved in Creation (Gen. 1:2; John 1:1-3; cf.

23
1 Cor. 8:5-6), so in all the great deeds of God, the Son and the Spirit
belong together: in the Incarnation (“who was conceived by the Holy
Spirit”), at the baptism of Jesus, and at His resurrection (1 Tim. 3:16).
Here is the inner reason for the Holy Spirit’s bonding Himself (as far
as we are concerned) with the external words of Scripture and their
preaching. He who in John 3:8 is likened to the wind that “blows where
it wills” has in His freedom as Lord (“And I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord”) bound Himself to the external means of grace, so that we
may know where we can find Him. For this reason, Luther explains,
the spiritualizers, who want to have the Spirit without the external
means of grace, make up their own means of grace. “Even so, the en-
thusiasts of our day condemn the external Word, yet they do not remain
silent but fill the world with their chattering and scribbling, as if the
Spirit could not come through the Scriptures or the spoken word of the
apostles but must come through their own writings and words” (Smal-
cald Articles III, VIII, 6).
The profound truth of these words is evidenced throughout history.
At the beginning of this century there appeared Religious Voices of the
Peoples. It was a time of great historical research into the books of the
Bible, and yet in German Protestantism understanding of the Bible had
reached its nadir. The “religious voices” were those of the classical writ-
ings of the great religions of Asia. In cultured society they became books
of edification and a means for achieving the “religious experience” which
the church could no longer provide. At that time Oswald Spengler made
his telling comment about the modern man who, instead of taking his
hymnbook and going to church, stayed at home and read Confucius on
rice paper.
Everywhere we seek the Holy Spirit, only not there where He is
to be found. And why not? We feel it is unworthy of the Holy Spirit to
bind Himself to such unimpressive external means as the homely words
of Scripture, the words of Scripture interpretation, the lowly water of
Baptism. “How can water produce such great effects?” we ask. To this
the Small Catechism replies: “It is not the water indeed that produces
these effects, but the Word of God connected with the water” [IV, 9-
10]. But we ask: “How can the lowly water in Baptism convey the Holy
Spirit?” It seems beneath the dignity of the Holy Spirit to be bonded
with something so elementary as water and the physical sound of human
words.
Zwingli expressed this thought in contradiction to Luther when he
laid down the principle that bodily eating and drinking can be of no

24
benefit to the soul. “The soul ‘eats’ spirit, and therefore it doe§ not eat
flesh” [This Is My Body, 1977, p. 193]. The humanism and idealism of
modern man are speaking through him, while Luther resolutely holds
to the fundamental Biblical concept of a real incarnation. “The Word
became flesh.” The Spirit comes in the external words of Scripture. In
the Lord’s Supper the bread is the body of Christ, and the wine His
blood—not only sign or symbol. This essence of the Biblical revelation
is perhaps the hardest thing we modern Christians, also we Lutherans,
must learn again. We are so accustomed to think of body and soul, flesh
and spirit, as opposites that we no longer understand that the whole
magnitude of God’s love lies in this very fact that God’s Son comes to
us in the flesh and that the Holy Spirit binds Himself to the external
means of grace.
As God outside of Christ always remains the hidden God, so His
Holy Spirit remains hidden from us unless we find Him in the Word and
in the sacraments. And just as the revelation of God in Christ is at the
same time God’s hiding in the human nature of Christ, so the Holy Spirit
of God is deeply hidden in the means of grace. He is always an object
of faith, not of sight. “I believe that by my own reason or strength I
cannot believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to him; but the Holy
Spirit has called me through the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts
...” [Small Catechism II, 6]. Similarly we cannot believe in the Holy
Spirit except by the witness He gives of Himself in God’s Word. There
both are found, the Son and the Spirit. There the Spirit witnesses to
the Son of God (1 Cor. 12:3). There the Son bears witness to the Holy
Spirit (see the words of the Lord about the Paraclete in John 14—16).
Without the Gospel, without the apostolic witness about Christ, we
would be like those disciples in Acts 19:1-7 who had only received John’s
baptism and did not know “that there is a Holy Spirit.” We might then
know of the Holy Spirit as a force, a divine power that comes upon
certain people, but we would not know that He is God. Only he who
confesses in the Second Article that the Son is “God of God, Light of
Light, very God of very God, begotten not made, being of one substance
with the Father. . . ” can go on to confess the faith of the Third Article:
I believe “in the Holy Spirit, the lord and giver of life, who proceeds
from the Father and the Son: who together with the Father and the
Son is worshiped and glorified: who spoke by the prophets” [Tappert,
p. 18, 19].

25
 5
The Holy Spirit wants to be found in the Word. There He reveals
Himself to us as God, as very God. Our faith in the Holy Spirit has
grown weak. We seem to regard Him as a power of God, but no longer
as a person. That He is more than the power of God that comes over
man we learn from our Lord Himself. Without the promises about the
Paraclete one could perhaps take the passages in the Old and the New
Testament that speak of the Spirit in that sense. This is the case es-
pecially since the Greek Pneuma Hagion is in the neuter, and not in
the masculine like the Latin Spiritus Sanctus. The Hebrew ruach is in
the feminine. This suggests the difficulty our human words have in
expressing the divine mystery of the Holy Spirit. In the Farewell Dis-
course in John, the Holy Spirit is called the Paraclete. “If I go, I will
send Him (auton) to you. And when He (ekeinos) comes, He will convince
the world. . . ” (16:7-8; ef. the following verses and 14:26; 15:26). That
this is not just Johannine is shown by Jesus’ words about blasphemy
against the Holy Spirit [Mark 3:29]. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit
is more than blasphemy against a something; it is blasphemy against a
person, as the juxtaposition of “Son of Man” and “Holy Spirit” shows
[Matt. 12:32; Luke 12:10]. And this person is God.
God’s Word witnesses to the fact that the Holy Spirit is very God,
or to be more exact, God the Holy Spirit witnesses to Himself in the
words of Scripture, and nowhere else. This makes clear, then, how
closely the understanding of Scripture as the Word of God hangs to-
gether with the right understanding of the Holy Spirit as a divine Per-
son. Here is one of the reasons why we have lost the correct doctrine
of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. If Scripture is no longer God’s Word,
then the Holy Spirit is no longer a divine Person. And vice versa:
Whoever does not understand the Spirit as a divine Person, but as a
motus in rebus creatus (“a movement which is produced in things”), as
the Augsburg Confession speaks of this error in Article I [Tappert, p.
28], also no longer understands Scripture as God’s Word but as a col-
lection of religious writings that may stir a sense of something divine,
“a breath of the divine.” As Goethe said about the gospels in his last
conversation with Eckermann: “There is in them the reflection of a
majesty that emanates from the person of Christ. Here is as eminently
divine a quality as can be found in any appearance ever of the divine
on earth.”
The development of Protestant theology since the Enlightenment
shows clearly that the decline of belief in Scripture as the Word of God

26
goes hand in hand with the decline of belief in the Holy Spirit asva divine
Person. We can observe this also today, even where it is supposed that
the old Liberalism has been overcome. What does the Holy Spirit mean
for Gogarten, to cite just one example? If we read his book on The
Proclamation of Jesus Christ (1948), we will find evidence enough for
what has just been said. Where the doctrine of the Person of the Holy
Spirit is no longer rightly taught, there also the doctrine of the Person
of Christ is no longer rightly understood. The fathers of the fourth
century knew this very well, and that brings us to one of the most
difficult problems in the history of doctrine, one that is of more than
just historical interest.

6
In studying the doctrine of inspiration in the fathers up to Augustine
and Gregory the Great, one cannot escape the question: “Why did these
theologians, when they came to speak of the relationship between Scrip-
ture and the Spirit, always draw their ideas from the Hellenistic syn-
agogue?” These ideas, as becomes quite clear in Philo, go back to heathen
concepts about the inspiration of prophets, sibyls, and the Sibylline
Books. This matter was taken up years ago in these letters in “Augus-
tine’s Doctrine of Inspiration” (No. 29; also Festschrift fiir Franz Dorn-
seiff, 1953, p. 262 ff.). Why did the fathers not simply say the same as
Scripture says about its origin, the same thing our Lord Himself said
(Matt. 22:43; John 5:39; 10:35), as well as His apostles (Acts 1:16; 2 Tim.
3:16; 2 Peter 1:19-21). Instead they tried to describe the process of
inspiration in terms of ancient psychology.
We must realize that all the well-known ideas and pictures that
have been in use since Augustine and Gregory to describe inspiration
(the “prompting” or “dictating” of the Spirit, the holy writers as “sec-
retaries” or “pens,” etc.) derive from the psychology current in late
antiquity, which could know nothing of the Holy Spirit. Just as the Holy
Spirit Himself is inaccessible to any psychology, so also are His work-
ings. Psychology may indeed examine certain psychological data, such
as those connected with conversions. It can also examine certain phe-
nomena of religious Enthusiasm. The proper work of the Holy Spirit,
however, lies beyond what any psychology can explain or describe: re-
generation, how the genuine prophets experienced God, what God’s
Word and the sacraments of Christ do in the human soul. The doctrine
of the inspiration of Scripture which the church confesses must be a

27
part of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, but such a doctrine was not yet
there when the fathers struggled with the problem of inspiration.
We seldom recall how long it took until the Scriptural doctrine of
the Holy Spirit was understood. Something similar may be said of the
doctrine of Christ. This doctrine was there from the beginning, ever
since Jesus asked His disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” [Matt.
16:15]. But it took centuries until Christendom realized what all was
included in the simple confessions, “Jesus is the Christ,” “Jesus Christ
is Lord,” “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God,” and until the
church recognized which wrong ideas had to be rejected if faith in Christ
were not to be lost. It took even longer before clarity was achieved as
to the full meaning of what Scripture says about the Holy Spirit.
Meanwhile Christians were being baptized “In the name of the Fa-
ther and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Out of the Trinitarian formula
of Baptism a three-part confession grew in Rome: “I believe in God the
Father . . . and in Jesus Christ . . . and in the Holy Spirit.” It was the
original form of our Apostles’ Creed. That the Christian faith is faith in
the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit was known by every Chris-
tian. But there was no pressing reason to think about the nature of the
Holy Spirit. Who thinks about the air he breathes?
Even in Nicaea, when the great controversy about Christology was
raging and the first decision regarding it was reached, the Holy Spirit
was not felt to be a problem. The old Nicene Creed of 325 drew on
earlier Eastern confessions, which derive finally from 1 Cor. 8:6. It
confessed faith in one God, the Father and Creator, and in one Lord
Jesus Christ. In its Christological article that creed develops a detailed
doctrine of the relationship between the Father and the Son that reaches
its climax in the homoousios (“being of one substance with the Father”).
This received further clarification in the condemnations of the Arians
which were appended. There is no “Third Article” such as in the old
Roman baptismal confession. Following the “Second Article” there is
only “and in the Holy Spirit.” Not until the Niceno-Constantinopolitan
Creed, the fuller creed of the Second Ecumenical Council in 381, is more
said about the Holy Spirit. This is what appears as the “Nicene Creed”
in our Confessions: “And in the Holy Spirit, the lord and giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father . . . : who together with the Father and
the Son is worshiped and glorified: who spoke by the prophets” [Tappert,
p. 19].
Why was this expansion undertaken?What happened between the
years 325 and 381? In the difficult struggles in 325 about the doctrine

28
of the true deity of the Son it had become evident that the homoousios
(“of one substance [with the Father]”) of the Son is closely related to
the homoousios of the Holy Spirit. One cannot confess that the Son is
very God without also confessing that the Holy Spirit is very God and
Lord.
This great recognition came to Athanasius as he struggled against
the enemies of the homoousios, the Arians and the mediating theo-
logians. This may have happened during his exile in the West. Here
since Tertullian and Novatian there had been more engagement with
the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and the terms for the doctrine of the
Trinity were already worked out. The Synod of Alexandria in 362 faced
the false doctrine of the Pneumatomachi. They, along with the Arians,
regarded the Holy Spirit as a creature. Athanasius opposed them and
persuaded the synod to confess: “The Spirit is of the same essence and
Godhead as the Father and the Son, and in the Trinity there is altogether
nothing creaturely, nothing lower and nothing later” (Hefele, I, 728).
The other patriarchates were slow in accepting this. Basil the Great
became a leading protagonist, while Gregory of Nazianzus, who presided
at the Second Ecumenical Council in 381, gives evidence of a remarkable
uncertainty in Oration 31, around the year 380:
Some members of our own intelligentsia suppose the Holy Spirit to
be an “activity,” others a “creature”; others think of him as God; yet
others fail to come to a decision, allegedly through reverence for the
Scriptures, on the ground that they give no clear revelation on the
question. The result is that they neither reverence the Spirit, nor
dishonour him, but take up a kind of neutral position—or rather a
pitiable position—with regard to him. Further, of those who suppose
him divine, some are reverent towards him in thought, but no further;
others go so far as to reverence him with their lips also. Others, even
cleverer, I have heard measuring out the godhead: they admit that
we have a union of three existences, but they put such a distance
between them as to make the first unlimited in substance and power,
the second unlimited in power, but not in substance, while the third
they represent as circumscribed in both substance and power [Bet-
tenson, Later Christian Fathers, p. 113].

Here we see the intensity of the theological struggle to confess the

Holy Spirit. We may observe also that what was confessed by the council
in 381 was not nearly so clear as what was confessed in 362 in Alexandria.
The creed of 381, which we call the Nicene Creed, does not explicitly
state the homoousios of the Holy Spirit; it is content to use expressions

29
that imply it. But the church in the East as well as in the West has
always taken these expressions as confessing the homoousios of the Holy
Spirit. Since the Council of Constantinople in 381 the whole church has
confessed that the Holy Spirit is God without reservation. And so the
confession of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity was completed 300 years
after the death of the apostles.

b
But was the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and with it the doctrine
of the Holy Spirit really completed? Such was the conviction of the
church. In reality, however, many questions remained open, as the sub-
sequent history shows.
The East never went all the way in its confession of homoousios,
for this means “of the same substance.” So it was confessed by Athan-
asius and by the church in the West. The East, represented by the three
great Cappadocians, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus,
could accept homoousios only in the sense of “similar substance.” Athan-
asius permitted this as long as homovos or homoviousios [“similar” or “of
similar substance”] was really understood in the sense of equality of
being. Like every truly orthodox theologian, Athanasius was fighting
for the doctrine, not for a theology. What mattered was the doctrine
that God is One and that there are three Persons, whether the mystery
of the Trinity was understood in the sense that the one God is Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, or in the sense that the three Persons, Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, are one God. Still today the mystery of the Trinity
is confessed in the East as three in one (Dreieinigkeit) and in the West
as one in three (Dreifaltigkeit). East and West complement each other
in confessing that mystery which lies beyond the reach of comprehen-
sion. They belong together. In this way some echo of Origen was ac-
ceptable in the church of the East, and also in the West.
The East made no further advance, while the West went deeper
with Augustine’s probing of the doctrine of the Trinity. The church in
the West gave the doctrine of the Trinity full confession in the Sym-
bolum Quicunque, which came to be wrongly ascribed to Athanasius
and was then called the Athanasian Creed, as it is in the Book of Con-
cord. Here we have the confession of the doctrine which found its way
into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed with the filioqgue, which con-
fesses that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
The Eastern Church subsequently pronounced this to be a falsifi-
cation of the creed, and regarded this “falsification” of its most sacro-

30
sanct church text as a grievous sin of Rome. The papacy has always
acknowledged that this creed can be used in the form employed by the
Eastern Church because the addition does not contradict the original
text. In the efforts toward reconciliation Rome has always required only
that what is confessed with filioque should not be denied. This question
of the filioque is the only creedal question between East and West, and
therefore it has played a great, and often excessive, role in the polemics
of the two confessions. Since Photius [ca. 820—891] Eastern theology
has attempted to discover a great heresy in the filioque.
Yet this question is not one to hinder an eventual union of Rome
with the Eastern Church. The difference in the way the doctrine is
confessed lies along the lines of how the Trinity is understood, as in-
dicated above. When the Eastern Church denies that the Spirit proceeds
from the Son, there is a sense in which it continues to make room for
the subordination of the Son to the Father which has its basis in Origen.
But it is no more than a hint of Subordinationism, for Subordinationism
itself is rejected by the homoousios of the Nicene Creed. And yet what
was inherited from the great Origen has not quite disappeared. The
situation might be put this way: As in many aspects of doctrine, cultus,
and polity, the church of the East represents an older tradition. The
church of the East did not participate in the development that took place
in the West.
Why not? Here we come upon a problem which has not been suf-
ficiently weighed in church history. It is the question of the consequences
for the history of doctrine occasioned by the downfall of the ancient
world.

8
When the Second Ecumenical Council met, the migration of nations
had already begun. In the course of the next century the whole Western
Empire fell to its Germanic conquerors. When the Third Ecumenical
Council met in Ephesus in 431, Augustine was not there. He had died
the previous year in Hippo Regius as it lay besieged by the Vandals.
When the Fourth Ecumenical Council met in Chalcedon in October of
451, the Huns were at the doors of Italy.
Everyone knows how the history of doctrine fared in the East in
the following generations under the influence of the disintegration of
the empire, but no one can tell what was lost to the church in those
centuries when the ancient civilization perished. How many questions

dl
 were not pushed through to resolution simply for lack of thinkers with
the competence to do so! We can only marvel that so much work,
thought, and discussion was nevertheless accomplished. Under what
deprivations, internal and external needs, did the later fathers have to
work! Anastasius Sinaiticus in the seventh century indicates how hard
it was to work in the wilderness, without a library, forced to rely on
his memory for quotations. How the level of theological work sank in
those centuries is clear if we compare Augustine with Gregory the Great.
The lamentable consequence of all this is that the doctrinal tasks
of the ancient church were cut short. It was only centuries later that
the heritage of Augustine was taken up by Western theology, and in
the Eastern Church this never happened. So only in the West was the
doctrine of the Trinity brought to what might be called completion. Of
the doctrine of the Holy Spirit one has to say that also in the West it —
remained unfinished. The great creed of 381, our Nicene Creed, received
remarkably little attention. At that time no one seemed to realize the
importance of that synod in Constantinople with its meager 180 bishops.
Its great achievement, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, appears
first in the acts of the Council of Chalcedon, and only thereafter does
it begin to supplant the creed of 325. The great ecumenical Niceno-
Constantinopolitan Creed, which East and West have in common, and
which they also share with the Nestorians and the Monophysites, has
always had the character of an unfinished symphony.
The filioque, added in the West and condemned in the East as a
creedal falsification, was not the only addition. In the Armenian liturgy
at the place of the Third Article we read: “We believe in the Holy Spirit,
who is not created and who is perfect. He has spoken in the law, in the
prophets, and in the Gospels. At the Jordan he descended, he proclaimed
his message to the apostles, and he dwells in the saints.” In another
version of the Armenian text the Holy Spirit is confessed as “of one
being with the Father and the Son.” (Caspari, Quellen, II, 33 [Hahn,
p. 153].) One must not overlook the fact that such texts were not trans-
mitted uniformly, as is shown by the variations in the different liturgies.
The one just quoted is evidence of the tendency not to rest content with
only an implicit confession of the homoousios of the Holy Spirit. This
tendency came to fruition in the West in the full statement of the doctrine
of the Trinity in the Quicunque.

9
“Who proceeds from the Father and the Son: who together with
the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.” The second “and

32
the Son” (et filio) is already there in the creed of 381 and maybe rec-
ognized as prompting the first “and the Son” (filioque). Already in the
debates prior to 381 we find “who with the Father and the Son at the
same time is worshiped and glorified.” Placing the Holy Spirit on an
equal level with the Father and the Son begins in the liturgy. Here is
a classic case of the rule, so vital for understanding the history of doc-
trine, that the movement is from liturgy to doctrine (Lex orandi lex
credendi). What comes to be confessed as doctrine in the church appears
first in the liturgy. The doctrine of the Trinity appears first in the Trin-
itarian baptismal formula. “By grace alone” (sola gratia), proclaimed in
the Reformation, was prayed in the Canon of the Mass. There in the
prayer Nobis quoque peccatoribus the plea is made to God “not to reckon
our merits but to pardon our transgressions” (non aestimator meriti,
sed veniae largitor). Sola gratia was also sung in hymns of the Middle
Ages: “King of majesty tremendous, Who dost free salvation send us
...” ((The Lutheran Hymnal 607:8] Rex tremendae majestatis, Qui
salvandos salvas gratis). So also the doctrine that the Holy Spirit is
truly God, a Person of the Holy Trinity, appears first in the liturgy,
when the Spirit is worshiped and glorified together with the Father and
the Son. Adoration belongs only to God, to the Triune God or the Persons
of the Holy Trinity. Whoever honors the Holy Spirit with the Father
and the Son is confessing the Holy Spirit’s full deity. Here arises an
interesting problem. We observe that in the liturgy, in the church’s
solemn prayers or collects, the Holy Spirit is always named together
with the Father and the Son. When the prayer is directed to the Father,
it concludes: “through Jesus Christ Your Son, our Lord, who with You
and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns to all eternity.” When the prayer
is directed to the Son, it concludes: “You who with the Father and the
Holy Spirit live and reign to all eternity.” But what about prayer to the
Holy Spirit? Here we confront the remarkable fact that such prayers
are never, or hardly ever, addressed to the Holy Spirit.
In the Eastern church they are unknown; only when the Triune
God is called upon is the Holy Spirit also called upon. When I put this
to an Eastern priest, he replied, “Well, you know that we do not have
the filioque.” To which I replied, “Yes, to be sure. Old Origen still
remains a force to be reckoned with among you.” And he agreed quite
cheerfully.
Even in the Epiclesis, the solemn act in the liturgy, it is not the
Holy Spirit that is called upon but the Father. The Father is called upon
to send down the Spirit “upon us and the gifts here present” to make

33
them the precious body and blood of Christ. We quote from the Epiclesis
of the Liturgy of St. James, because here we have an especially full
statement about the Holy Spirit:
Send upon us and the gifts here present your all-holy Spirit, the Lord
and giver of life, who with you, God the Father, and your only-be-
gotten Son, is enthroned and rules together. He is of the same being
(homoousios) and co-eternal. He has spoken in law and prophets and
your new testament. He descended in the form of a dove upon our
Lord Jesus Christ at the Jordan river and remained upon him. In the
form of fiery tongues he came down upon the apostles in the upper
room of the holy and glorious Zion on the day of the holy Pentecost.
Him himself send, O Lord, your all-holy Spirit, upon us and these holy
gifts here present . . . [Hanggi, p. 250; Jasper, p. 63].

It is impossible to make a more powerful confession of the Holy Spirit’s

true deity, and yet this church never took the step of calling upon the
Holy Spirit Himself.
Also in the West it took centuries before this happened. Even today
neither the Pentecost liturgy nor the Mass of the Holy Spirit contains
such a prayer. There is only the call: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts
of Your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of Your love,” the Veni,
Sancte Spiritus, which follows the Hallelujah or the Gradual and from
which grew the medieval sequence and the hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus
[(“Come, Holy Ghost, Creator Blest].”
What is the explanation? Does this reticence perhaps have Biblical
grounds? Holy Scripture has no calling upon the Holy Spirit comparable
with the calling upon Christ that is found there. But when we consider
the fact that in the Eastern liturgy (but not in the Roman Mass) a calling
upon Mary has its settled place, we will scarcely be inclined to consider
this a valid reason.
The puzzle grows when we consider that there was indeed a church
in whose liturgy prayers were addressed to the Holy Spirit, the Visi-
gothic church in Spain. In its liturgy, called the Mozarabic liturgy, we
find: “O Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son (qui a
Patre Filioque procedis), teach us to do the truth, so that You, who
have undertaken procession from the Father and the Son, may with
love invisible join us to them from whom You so ineffably proceed”
(MPL, 86, 691). This is only one example from the Breviarium Gothi-
cum. In Isidore’s Missale Mixtum the Holy Spirit is called upon in the
Postpridie to accept the sacrifice: “Accept, we pray, O Holy Spirit,
omnipotent God, the sacrifices . . . For you are in truth that fire which

34
divinely accepted and consumed the sacrifices of our fathers. . ./.” Then
before the Our Father the Holy Spirit is called upon anew: “O Paraclete,
Spirit, You who continue to be with the Father and the Son one God in
Trinity, so fill our minds that with You praying for us we may here on
earth with great confidence say, ‘Our Father. . .’” (MPL 85, 620 [Beck-
mann, Quellen, pp. 95 f.].)
Clearly these prayers grew out of Augustine’s doctrine of the Trin-
ity. They follow logically from the filiogue,whose grounds were stated
by Augustine and which was included in the creed as confessed in the
Visigothic church in Spain (Toledo 589), from where it traveled to the
kingdom of the Franks. The history that led to this development is
unknown to us. It happened during the dark period of the migration of
the nations which followed the death of Augustine. The prayers of the
Mozarabic liturgy are what is left to us as monuments from a forgotten
period of the church’s history, a period when from the orthodox doctrine
of the Trinity, as Augustine had completed it for the West, the conclusion
was drawn that in the prayers of the liturgy the church not only may
but must pray to the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit who
proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the
Son is of one being, true God from eternity to eternity.
That this liturgical development did not spread more widely through
the church in the West may be explained by the fact that Rome was
not aware of this calling upon the Spirit in church that was customary
in Spain. Rome preserved an older type of dealing with the Trinity in
the liturgy. It did not allow the liturgical consequences of the filioque
doctrine to come to expression. This seems to explain why most Roman
Catholic liturgiologists in their debates about whether and where there
may be traces of an Epiclesis in the Mass have tended to overlook the
fact that the Mass contains a calling upon the Holy Spirit in away which
is more than the Eastern church’s calling upon the Father to send the
Spirit. It is there in the Offertory prayer: “Come, Sanctifier, almighty,
eternal God, and bless this sacrifice” (Veni sanctificator omnipotens
aeterne Deus, et benedic hoc sacrificium). Sanctificator, the One who
sanctifies, is adesignation of the Holy Spirit. That this is so is evidenced
by the Mozarabic liturgy, where in the same prayer the Spirit is ex-
plicitly named.
The characteristic conservatism of the liturgy is perhaps explana-
tion enough for the prayers to the Holy Spirit not being further devel-
oped. The liturgy reaches back into the time when there was as yet no
Trinitarian dogma. In the Gloria in Excelsis, for example, the Holy Spirit

30
receives only bare mention at the end, as is also the case in the creed
of 325. In the Middle Ages hymns were sung to the Holy Spirit, and
the churches of the Reformation have the usage of prayers to the Holy
Spirit. That there is nothing here conflicting with Roman doctrine is
evidenced by the solemn prayer with which the sessions of the Vatican
Council were begun. We quote a few words from the lengthy prayer
addressed to the Holy Spirit: “We are here, Lord, Holy Spirit. We stand
here before You held back by the greatness of our sins, but it is in Your
name that we are especially assembled. Come to us and be with us... .
As You work our judgments be also their Health, You who alone with
the Father and His Son possess the glorious name. .. .” Then come
further prayers, among which there is an indirect prayer for the Spirit:
“We beseech You, O Lord, that the Paraclete, who proceeds from You,
may enlighten our souls and lead us into all truth, as Your Son has
promised, who with You lives. . .”
No, there is simply nothing that can be raised as an objection to
our praying to the Holy Spirit just as we do to the Father and the Son.
Is our neglect of such prayer perhaps the reason why Christianity has
erred into so many false pathways? Has the place left empty of prayers
to the Holy Spirit perhaps been occupied by the cult of the saints? Has
Mary perhaps in practice often come to occupy the place that belongs
to the Holy Spirit? And what has become of the Trinity when a pope in
our day died with the prayer: “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, into your hands I
commend my spirit”? And of the churches which claim to have the her-
itage of the Reformation, must we not also say that they, even though
in different ways, show loss of the true faith in the Holy Spirit?

10
The doctrine of the Holy Spirit belongs to the uncompleted doctrines
of the church. Can we find the explanation for this in the fact that,
strictly speaking, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit belongs with escha-
tology, the doctrine of the Last Things? When on the day of Pentecost
the Holy Spirit was poured out upon the apostles, there was fulfilled,
as Peter said in the church’s first Pentecost sermon, that which according
to the prophet Joel was to happen “in the last days,” in the days of the
Messiah, at the end of the world. The Third Article of the creed indeed
has to do with the Last Things, with what will happen at the end of the
world. The Holy Spirit as the possession of the entire people of God,
not merely as an occasional and temporary gift, is a gift of the end time.

36
The Holy Spirit brings blessed eternity into time now in this world,
forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. So also the one holy catholic and
apostolic church which we confess in this same article is a fact of the
end time. The church, God’s own holy people, makes its journey from
one age to the next, traveling through the wilderness of this world. It
has been delivered from the slavery of Egypt, the old age, but has not
yet arrived in the land of promise, the new age. To this article belongs
faith in the resurrection of the dead and the waiting for the life of the
world to come. This article ends in eternity. Therefore it necessarily
remains uncompleted.
It has often been supposed that the neglect of the doctrine of the
Holy Spirit is to be explained by the fact that here we are confronted
with things intangible. There is more than a grain of truth in this.
However, we ought never to forget the actuality of what the Holy Spirit
does. What the church of the apostles and of the early Christians ex-
perienced as the reality of the Holy Spirit was not first of all the spec-
tacular gifts of the Spirit which occurred at that time, the gifts of healing,
prophecy, speaking in tongues, and whatever else has in the church’s
history been regarded as extraordinarily miraculous manifestations of
the Spirit. Far more important were the great and lasting workings of
faith, hope, and love.
If one reads the old sermons and records of what the ancient church
experienced every year in the time between Easter and Pentecost, an
echo of which can still be heard in the old liturgical texts, then one can
say that what was experienced at this time of the church year was an
inexpressible joy. We spoke of this in an earlier letter [No. 37, Freu-
denzeit der Kirche]). This joy lives in our Lord’s Farewell Discourses,
which have been the source of so many Gospel readings in the time from
Easter to Pentecost. It is the more-than- earthly joy that we hear from
the mouths of the ancient martyrs, the joy that is a foretaste of ever-
lasting blessedness. It was not just due to a misunderstanding of the
word “Paraclete” that He came to be called the Comforter. “You have
sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and
no one will take your joy from you” [John 16:22]. “Your sorrow will turn
into joy” [v. 20]. “... that My joy may be in you, and that your joy
may be full”[John 15:11]. All of this is in what our Lord promises of the
Holy Spirit, the Comforter.
One of the deepest heartaches of human existence is the riddle of
work cut short, left unfinished. Many of our Lutheran churches have in
this century twice lost the fairest flowering of their young theologians.

37
We who were the teachers of one of these lost generations have often
asked ourselves what sense there could be in such a tragedy. There is
no other answer than faith in the Holy Spirit, He who brings uncom-
pleted work to completion. We remember those nuns in the French
Revolution who, as they were lead from their cloister to the scaffold,
sang the Veni, Creator Spiritus. They stood in the great apostolic
succession of the confessors and martyrs of all times, down to those in
our own day. Somewhere in China faith in the Lord Christ is sealed
with the death of nameless martyrs. No one will know their confession—
one of the meanings of confessio is the grave of a martyr—until that
day when all graves will be opened.
Our Lord, after His Farewell Discourses, prayed His High Priestly
Prayer thinking of all His faithful ones, also those known only to Him.
In this prayer He speaks words which no man ever prayed in the face
of death, in the face of what, to all human evaluation, marked His life
and work as uncompleted: “Father, the hour has come; glorify Thy Son
that the Son may glorify Thee. . . . I glorified Thee on earth, having
accomplished the work which Thou gavest Me to do. .. . I have man-
ifested Thy name... ” [John 17:1, 4, 6]
“T have glorified You. I have done the work You gave me to do. I
have made Your name known to men.” Where the church, where we
servants of the Lord, can speak thus as we follow Jesus on the way of
the cross: “We have glorified Yow and not ourselves; we have done the
work You gave us to do, not what we have sought for ourselves; we
have manifested Your name, not our name or the name of our big or
little church”—only insofar as we can say this will there be a fulfillment
of the promise: “I will pray the Father, and He will give you another
Counselor [“Comforter” in the German] to be with you forever, even
the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither
sees Him nor knows Him; you know Him, for He dwells with you, and
will be in you” [John 14:16-17]. Where this is a vital reality in the church,
there the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is no longer an abstract dogma,
for then the Holy Spirit is a living Reality. The world will never un-
derstand this; also not the world that is in the church, also not the world
that is in our own hearts. But He who has overcome the world, also the
world in the church and the world in our stubborn and despairing hearts,
says to all who believe in His name: “The Spirit of truth . . . dwells with
you, and will be in you.”
We hardly need to say any more about what this faith in the Holy
Spirit means for the church today and for us pastors. Without this faith

38
the history of the church and the life of Christians would have no mean-
ing. But where this faith is alive and truly taught, there is the one holy
catholic and apostolic church, to which the promise has been given that
the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
Dear brother pastors, let us pray for this faith, and in this faith do
the work given us to do for Christ’s church.

39
 ARTICLE VII OF THE
AUGSBURG
CONFESSION
IN THE PRESENT CRISIS
OF LUTHERANISM
Letters to Lutheran Pastors, No. 53
April 1961

On July 1, 1868, there was the first meeting, in Hannover, of the General
Evangelical-Lutheran Conference. The meeting began with divine ser-
vice in St. Mark’s Church. The preacher was Luthardt, who became
editor of their church paper. The text was 1 Cor. 4:1 f.; the theme, “Of
the True Faithfulness of the Servants of Jesus Christ.” Harless from
Munich opened the sessions with an address through which there rang
a deep tone of repentance. He spoke of the common plight of Lutheran-
ism. “If we speak of our wounds and what we suffer from them, we do
not speak so much of wounds which others have given us, but of the
wounds which we have inflicted upon ourselves in ignorance or unfaith-
fulness.” Then came the hymn “Lord Jesus Christ, with us abide, For
round us falls the eventide.” Then Kliefoth from Schwerin gave his
famous address: “What Is Required of Church Government in the Lu-
theran Church According to Article VII of the Augsburg Confession?”
If we only had more time to attend this meeting and listen to these
great men! We are in desperate need of knowing our history through
the last century and a half. The accounts given in the usual textbocks
show little understanding or sympathy for what happened; in some there
is little more than shreds and falsification.
But we want to point out that in one of Lutheranism’s most dire
crises Article VII of the Augsburg Confession came to occupy the center
of the discussion. What was at stake was nothing more and nothing less
than the existence of the Lutheran territorial churches in Germany as

40
Lutheran. In the wars of 1864 and 1866 Prussia had annexed Schleswig-
Holstein, Hannover, and Electoral Hesse. This brought the demand that
the Prussian Union should be imposed also on these new provinces of
the Prussian state. Nothing characterizes the situation better than the
famous letter which Harless, the president of the Lutheran Conference,
wrote to Bismarck in November of 1870. At the same time Bishop Ket-
teler of Mainz, the spokesman for the Catholic bishops in Germany,
wrote a similar letter to the chancellor. Their plea that in the consti-
tution, which was being prepared for the new German Empire, the
rights of the churches in Germany should be respected, was in vain.
(Documents in Th. Heckel’s Adolph von Harless, pp. 482 ff.) Harless
spoke of the profound concern of committed Lutherans in Germany that
the Lutheran Church would be robbed of its place in territory after
territory, with the result that it could only continue to exist in small
free churches, or that Lutheranism would become only a theological
viewpoint within other, non-Lutheran churches. “Only with the pro-
foundest grief can one think such thoughts through to the end, that the
Lutheran Church . . . would have her lamp cast aside in Germany” (p.
485).
In this situation the Lutherans pondered Article VII of the Augs-
burg Confession. It was too late. Today, after almost a century, Har-
less’s prophecy has been fulfilled in Germany. Apart from the free
churches, Lutheranism no longer lives on as a church but as a viewpoint,
as a “theological school of thought,” within one Evangelical Church, as
both Schleiermacher and Barth said. Even the territorial churches which
are nominally and de iwre Lutheran have no- longer de facto preserved
the Lutheran confessional position.
The men of 1868 turned their eyes to Lutheranism elsewhere in the
world, to the Scandinavian lands and to America. Just at that time in
America the gathering together of confessional Lutherans was under
way. The General Council was gathering the confessional synods which
could no longer go along with the unionistic General Synod. In the Mid-
west, confessional synods were joining with Missouri to form the Syn-
odical Conference (1872). At that time the first beginnings of ecumenical
Lutheranism could be noticed everywhere. The question as to what
creates church fellowship according to Scripture and the Confessions
was always the thing that caused separations and led to new unions. A
new day was dawning for the Lutheran Church.
Today the question we cannot escape is whether the way things
went with Lutheranism in Germany will be the way things go with

41
Lutheranism elsewhere in the world. Will Lutheranism everywhere be-
come merely a viewpoint within church bodies that are not in fact Lu-
theran? The confessionally committed Lutherans in Denmark, Norway,
and Sweden are even more lonely today than their brethren in the faith
in Germany. The churches to which they belong are now only nominally
Lutheran. Things are moving in the same direction also in America, and
with the same speed with which everything seems to happen in the New
World. The fact that Lutheranism now faces the greatest crisis in its
history cannot be hidden by the putting together of big new church
bodies in America, nor by the gigantic organization of the Lutheran
World Federation with its reported 60 million “Lutherans,” including
the atheists and Communists in whole countries that once embraced the
Reformation. The crisis is evidenced theologically in the general uncer-
tainty regarding the great article of the Augsburg Confession about the
church. Whatever else it may mean, this article is the Magna Charta of
the Lutheran Church. We will all do well to study it thoroughly, so that
we will be up to the tasks which lie before each of us.

1
Article VII of the Augsburg Confession is the first doctrinal state-
ment ever made in Christendom about what the church is and wherein
is her unity. Before the Reformation, people were content to confess
the statement of faith in the Nicene Creed: “I believe (the Greek text
adds ‘in’) one holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” What this church is
and wherein lies its unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity— these
were questions which theologians wrote about, and which were variously
thought of by the various Christian denominations in ancient times, such
as the Montanists, Novatians, Donatists, and Catholics. For the word
“catholic,” when used as in Catholic Church (Augustine, communio cath-
olica), referred to only one of the numerous groups which regarded
themselves as the true church. Yet they did not feel it was necessary
to have a doctrinal definition of what the church is, not even in the
Catholic Church or churches (they were not always in church fellowship
with each other).
Many of those who participated in the World Conference on Faith
and Order in Lausanne in 1927 were astonished to hear the represent-
ative of the Ecumenical Patriarch declare at the beginning that the
question “What is the church?” belongs to the open questions which
theologians are free to have their disputes about. Only that is church

42
dogma which is stated in the Third Article of the Nicene Creed. Similarly
Rome. The Roman Catechism speaks of the church in its exposition of
the creed, but the catechism is not dogma. So we find lively debate in
the 19th century about what the church is, particularly in German Ca-
tholicism since Mohler. We cannot here speak of how the Vatican Council
of 1869/70 in vain sought to complete a dogma “Of the Church of Christ”
but had to leave this task to the future. All previous documents, such
as the encyclical Mystici corporis, can only be viewed as preparatory.
Echoes of Article VII of the Augsburg Confession are to be found
in all the Reformed confessions of the 16th century. Of particular sig-
nificance is Article 19 of the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles, where the
definition according to the official English text reads:
The visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men (Latin
coetus fidelium), in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the
Sacraments be duly administered according to Christ’s ordinance in
all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

The reason why the Augsburg Confession had to speak on this

matter is clear. The article goes back to Article 12 of the Schwabach
Articles, and behind that lies Luther’s Great Confession of 1528:
Next, I believe that there is one holy Christian (“Christian” is
used here, as in the late Middle Ages, for catholica in the sense of
embracing all of Christendom) Church on earth, i.e., the community
or number or assembly of all Christians in all the world, the one bride
of Christ, and his spiritual body of which he is the only head. The
bishops or priests are not her heads or lords or bridegrooms, but
servants, friends, and—as the word “bishop” implies— superintend-
ents, guardians, or stewards.
This Christian Church exists not only in the realm of the Roman
Church or pope, but in all the world, as the prophets foretold that the
gospel of Christ would spread throughout the world, Psalm 2 [:8],
Psalm 19 [:4]. Thus this Christian Church is physically dispersed
among pope, Turks, Persians, Tartars, but spiritually gathered in one
gospel and faith, under one head, i.e., Jesus Christ. For the papacy
is assuredly the true realm of Antichrist, the real anti-Christian ty-
rant, who sits in the temple of God and rules with human command-
ments, as Christ in Matthew 24 [:24] and Paul in II Thessalonians 2
[:3 f.] declare; although the Turk and all heresies, wherever they may
be, are also included in this abomination which according to prophecy
will stand in the holy place, but are not to be compared to the papacy
(WA 26, 506 f. [American Edition 37, 367 f.]).

43
 Even if we were to disregard the doctrine of the Antichrist, which
was for Luther a part of the doctrine of the church, this quotation shows
why the Reformation had to ask and answer the question: “What is the
church?” The highest office in the church had rejected the holy Gospel,
and those who proclaimed this Gospel had been put out of the fellowship
of the church. For this reason Luther and those with him had to say
why they could not recognize the papal excommunication as exclusion
from the church. Thus the ecclesiological question was put, and an an-
swer had to be given.

2
The answer which Article VII of the Augsburg Confession gives to
the question of the church is best understood within its context. What
it says is supplemented particularly in Articles V, VIII, and XXVIII.
The whole of the Augsburg Confession is the context for Article VII,
and its great exposition is given in the Apology. This does not mean
that our Confessions say everything there is to be said about the church
and leave no question open. They do not claim to do this.
The doctrine of the church is like other parts of Christian doctrine,
both simple and inexhaustible. “A seven-year-old child,” says Luther,
“knows what the church is, namely, holy believers and sheep who hear
the voice of their shepherd” (Smaleald Articles III, XII, 2). While a
child may well know the voice of its Good Shepherd and yet the deepest
thinkers through the centuries of the church have not been able to ex-
haust the truth of Scripture regarding the Lord Christ, so also the
actuality of the church remains an inexhaustible problem for theology.
There are questions which our Confessions do not answer, nor have they
been answered by other churches.
One such question has to do with how it is to be understood when
the New Testament speaks of the church as the body of Christ. In what
sense is it a body, according to Scripture? Certainly not in the sense in
which the word “body” is used of a number of people joined together in
an association. Not only what we call the universal church is the body
of Christ, but also “the church of God in Corinth” or in any other place.
What is the relationship between the “sacramental” and the npn
body of Christ?
Another question which did not engage our fathers in the 16th
century is the eschatological sense of the church. There is church only
in the end time. “In the last days” the prophecy of Joel was fulfilled at

44
Pentecost (Acts 2:16-21). John says in his day, “It is the last hour”
(1 John 2:18).
For answering such questions our Confessions provide vital re-
sources, as for example in the doctrine of the Antichrist. But unfolding
them demands deep study of Scripture. In this sense Vilmar was right
in speaking of the doctrine of the church as an uncompleted doctrine.
There are depths not yet plumbed to which the church may be led.
Throughout the whole of Christianity questions are today being asked
about the church, and so also among the Lutherans around the world.
Our church would be dead if we supposed that we had nothing more to
learn.

3
What is the church? Our Confession gives an answer which in a
noteworthy way immediately differentiates itself from the answers of
other churches. Article 19 of the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles repro-
duces the definition of Article VII, but makes a characteristic change
by inserting “visible.” “The viszble Church of Christ is the congregation
” This is done in opposition to the confessions of all the other Re-
formed churches. These, guided by Zwingli, Bucer, and Calvin, regard
the true church as invisible. The Anglican insertion was perhaps done
in deliberate opposition to the Scottish Confession of 1560, which links
the doctrine of the church with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the
doctrine of the person of Christ, and then says: “This Kirk is invisible,
known only to God, who alone knows whom He has chosen” [16, Coch-
rane, p. 175].
Our Confession does not make this distinction between an invisible
and a visible church. Luther does indeed, now and then, speak of the
church as invisible, but in an altogether different sense. It would have
been better for Lutheran theology never to have spoken as though there
were two churches, one visible and another invisible. This distinction
derives from the Reformed doctrine of predestination. It goes back to
Augustine, and in the Middle Ages is found in Wycliffe. The invisible
church is made up of all the predestined, the visible church of the bap-
tized. It is possible to be a member of the one without being a member
of the other. The sacrament of Baptism is here then only the outward
sign of the baptism with the Holy Spirit. For the person who is not
predestined to eternal life the baptism with water remains only a sign
without effect.

45
 This distinction is rejected by the Lutheran Church as unbiblical.
Baptism according to the New Testament is not only a sign but the
means that washes away sins (Eph. 5:26), “the washing of regeneration”
(Titus 3:5). So there are not two churches, one the visible fellowship of
those who have received a sign of regeneration, and the other the in-
visible fellowship of those who have been born again of the Holy Spirit
to eternal life. Our church also confesses election to eternal life and
knows that those baptized may be lost, and that by their own fault. We
bow before the God whose hidden decisions, which He has not revealed
to us, we do not understand. We bow before the God who “desires all
men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” [1 Tim.
2:4], and who yet allows so many to be lost eternally. But we can never
surrender the promises that are bound up with the means of grace. We
can never say that He did not mean His promises. A person can lose
the blessing of Baptism by not again and again, yes daily, receiving the
promise of Christ in faith. But the promise remains. Baptism remains
the same.
In the controversies about Baptism between the Lutherans and the
Reformed in the 16th century, which we should study far more thor-
oughly, our theologians liked to refer to the “one Baptism” of Eph. 4:5,
which was also taken into the Nicene Creed. From this great Pauline
passage, on which also Article VII of the Augsburg Confession rests,
as also from the “one God . . . and one Lord” in 1 Cor. 8:6, we have the
repeated “one” in the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one God, the Father
... and in one Lord Jesus Christ . . . one holy, catholic, and apostolic
church . . . one Baptism for the remission of sins.” What is confessed
here from the New Testament, “one Baptism,” is a defense not only
against the idea that Baptism can be repeated, but also against the
Platonizing splitting up of this sacrament into a physical baptism and a
spiritual baptism.
This is true not only of the means of grace, but also of the church.
Our Confession confesses only one church, and not two. The church may
not be split into an invisible one and a visible one, no matter what some
later Lutheran theologians may have thought about it. Thereby our
Confession follows the Nicene and the Apostles’ Creed, and the New
Testament. When the question is put whether Article VII of the Augs-
burg Confession is speaking of the invisible church, as the Reformed
understood this article, or of the visible church, as the Anglicans inter-
preted it for themselves, we simply have to say that the question is

46
wrongly put; the article does not know this distinction, and neither does
the New Testament.

4
This great article has been taken apart in some unhelpful attempts
to explain it. The first sentence is said to refer to the invisible church,
since the one holy church, the one that goes on forever, is an article of
faith and therefore is invisible. The second sentence, on the other hand,
is taken as referring to the visible church, since the congregation of all
believers, in which the Gospel is preached and the sacraments are be-
stowed, is made up of visible people among whom here on earth the
means of grace are administered and received.
The contradictions inherent in this should have led to the realization
that the question is wrongly put. The author of the Augsburg Confession
was not one who was unable to think clearly and logically. Neither was
Luther, for that matter, who shared responsibility for the Schwabach
Articles and expressed the matter in the same way in his “Great Confes-
sion” of 1528. Can one imagine that they would not have noticed such
a confusion of concepts? If we examine the debates over Article VII in
the 19th and 20th centuries, we find that these controversies about its
meaning do not derive from any unclarity in the Confession, but rather
from the unclear thinking of its interpreters, who attempted to read
into it later theological notions and the categories of their own eccle-
siology.
Like other articles, so also this one basically sets down the teaching
of the New Testament, where the church is always both an actual,
concrete gathering of people whom one can see, and also the communion
of saints, the people of God, the body of Christ which one must believe.
What the Jews and the heathen saw in Corinth was a group of people
who assembled together. What they did not see was the holiness of
these people, was the character of this group as the people of God, the
body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit. Yes, also the saints in
Corinth, to the extent that they were really saints and not Pharisees
or hypocrites, did not themselves see the holiness that was theirs.
That your sins are forgiven must be believed. The Christians in
Corinth had to believe that they were God’s people and that in, with,
and under their visible assembly the spiritual body of Christ was pres-
ent—just as they could not see, taste, or feel that the consecrated bread
and the consecrated wine in the Lord’s Supper were the true body and
the true blood of Christ. They had to believe that.

47
 Also for the church of the New Testament the church was not an
article of sight but an article of faith in the strict sense of the word.
And so it was in the church which confessed the Nicene Creed and
therein the great article of the one, holy church. Only in faith could the
Catholics in ancient Christendom (already then Catholic was a confes-
sional designation) assert that they were the true church and not the
Novatians, who asserted the same regarding themselves, for they not
only held the orthodox faith but also had the older forms of church
discipline. Only in faith could Augustine know that not the Donatists
were the true church, but rather that fellowship which he called the
communio catholica. The church is always an object of faith.
This is basically the case also for Roman Catholicism today. The
conviction that the church is and must be as visible as was the ancient
people of Israel, as is any social organization of people on earth, is
qualified by the fact that Rome never knows exactly where the bound-
aries of the church are. In what sense can those who are excommunicated
be said to be members of the church, whose members they remain?
When schismatic churches possess the priesthood and episcopal conse-
crations, when even the baptisms performed by heretics, if they are
done properly, are valid, and when today heretics are called “separated
brethren,” where is then the exact boundary of the church? Already
Optatus of Mileve [fourth century] bestowed the name of brother upon
the Donatists, with exhaustive theological grounds for doing so in his
seven books on the Donatist schism (Migne, PL 11, 962 ff., 1029 f.). The
editors of the German edition of Thomas [Aquinas] speak in the intro-
duction to Vol. 29 of “the visible church of Christ, which is visible only
in and through its sacraments.” Do we not here have the Catholic coun-
terpart to the Lutheran doctrine of the means of grace, the Gospel and
the sacraments as the notae ecclesiae, the only marks by which we can
in faith recognize the presence of the church?
Basically it is the conviction of ali Christianity that the church is
an article of faith and so not an object of observation. Otherwise the
article of faith confessed in the creed about the church would have no
sense. “It is necessary that everything which is believed should be hid-
den,” says Luther in De servo arbitrio (opus est, ut omnia quae cre-
duntur, abscondantur, WA 18, 633 [American Edition 33, 62]).When
he then draws the conclusion: “The Church is hidden, the saints are
unknown” (Abscondita est ecclesia, latent sancti [WA 18, 652; American
Edition 33, 89]), the Catholics have never acknowledged this. They must
admit, however, that there is some truth here. That is shown by the

48
quotation we have cited about the sacraments. Even for Rome the
church is not quite so visible as the kingdom of France or the republic
of Venice, as Bellarmine once maintained in his extreme polemics against
the Reformation [Mirbt, p. 361].

5
One great truth, then, that is confessed in Article VII of the Augs-
burg Confession is that the church of Christ is always an object of faith.
The other great truth is that it is always a reality in this world. It is
made up of living people. So the Apology protests against the misun-
derstanding which thinks of the church as a “Platonic state”:
We are not dreaming about some Platonic republic, as has been slan-
derously alleged, but we teach that this church actually exists, made
up of true believers and righteous men scattered throughout the
world. And we add its marks, the pure teaching of the Gospel and the
sacraments. This church is properly called“the pillar of truth” (I Tim.
3:15), for it retains the pure Gospel and what Paul calls the “foun-
dation” (I Cor 3:12). . . (Apology VII and VIII, 20 [Tappert p. 171)).

In order to grasp what our Confession teaches about the reality of

the church in the world, one must learn to grasp what kind of realities
the Gospel and the sacraments are for Luther and for the Lutheran
Church of the Reformation. Modern man, like the educated humanistic
people at that time, sees in the Gospel a religious message, the proc-
lamation of the truths of Christendom. He understands the sacraments
as holy actions which symbolically represent a deeper truth. By the
power that inheres in a symbol they could be more than mere signs.
Luther goes back to Holy Scripture. There the Word of God is more
than a religious message. “Behold, I have put My words in your mouth.
See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck
up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to
plant” (Jer. 1:9-10). Thus the Lord speaks to Jeremiah in the hour of
his call, and similarly He speaks to all His prophets. Man’s word can do
much, but it cannot do what God’s Word can do, the Word of the Creator
and Redeemer, the Word of the Judge and the Fulfiller. Therefore God’s
own Word has been put into the mouth of His prophets. This Word has
not only created the world but also makes history. The fate of Israel as
well as of the Eastern peoples and world empires is determined through
this Word. “But now thus says the Lord, He who created you, O Jacob,
He who formed you, O Israel: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you. . . .

49

San Diego, CA 92119-s9Ue

I give Egypt as your ransom. Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you”
(Is. 43:1, 3). “Thus says the Lord to His anointed, to Cyrus, whose right
hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him and ungird the loins
of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed. I will
go before you. . .” (Is. 45:12). This is not just interpretation of history.
This is a revelation of the deepest core of the world-historical events of
that time, when the Neobabylonian Empire collapsed under Persian
attack and Israel was saved. God’s Word makes history.
That is also true of the Word of God committed to the church. Also
the fates of the peoples of modern Europe are determined by the Word
of God which is proclaimed to them, is believed and rejected. When in
the empty churches of modern nations the Word of God is preached by
a faithful pastor to a handful of people, then this Word, because it is
God’s Word, becomes a judgment upon people who have rejected God
and the faith of their fathers. And at the same time it becomes the Word
of deliverance for the “holy remnant.”
In my first years in the pastoral office in the environs of Berlin we
pastors often asked what would become of the villages in which, Sunday
after Sunday, divine service was held with a few old women—that is,
if the service was not canceled. Kliefoth often asked what might come
upon Mecklenburg, where the landed gentry refused to give their day
laborers Saturday afternoon off, with the result that all the work that
they had to do for themselves had to be done on Sunday. Today we
know how such contempt for God’s Word is punished. “For the Word
of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb.
4:12). That is so today, as it has been for thousands of years, and will
be so also in the future until the end of the world. The recognition of
this reality of the Word of God is the basis for recognizing the reality
of the church.
It is perhaps even more difficult for modern man to recognize the
reality of the Word when it comes to him as Gospel. The reality of God’s
judgment is still to some extent recognizable. But the reality of grace
is impenetrable to modern man, because in losing an understanding for
sin he has also lost an understanding for grace. This is evidenced by the
decline of confession and absolution in Protestantism—which, by the
way (something we should not forget), has its parallels in the Roman
church. What does it mean to go to Confession once a year, or not for
many years and then on the deathbed, for the unchurched masses of
nominal Catholics in Vienna, Paris, or Rio de Janeiro? Do we still know
the solid joy of being sure that the absolution I have received from my

50
pastor is God’s forgiveness, spoken by the mouth of His servant, and
therefore valid in heaven? The heart of the Gospel is the forgiveness of
sins—not a doctrine about it, that and how there is forgiveness, but the
bestowing of this forgiveness in the absolution. The same is to be said
also of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Do we still
believe what actually happens in these sacraments as we learned it in
the Catechism?
Only when we again grasp the reality of the Word of God and the
sacraments will we also grasp the reality of the church as confessed in
our Confessions. The church is no Platonic state, but an actuality in the
world. It is “the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is
preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered ac-
cording to the Gospel” (Article VII, German text). The administration
of the means of grace happens here in this world. They are extended
to people who are all quite tangible. As the Lord is active in, with, and
under the dealings of men—as He baptizes, absolves, consecrates, gives
His true body and His true blood, gives the Holy Spirit, faith, life,
blessing—so a holy church is present in, with, and under the assembly
of these concrete human beings. For the promise of God bound up with
these means remains valid under all circumstances.
From this it is clear that the first and second sentences of the article
are indissolubly bonded together. The one church of faith, spoken of in
the first sentence, is identical with the visible assembly insofar as this
church is present in, with, and under this assembly. This does not ex-
clude the fact that there may be among them hypocrites and unbelievers,
unworthy and hypocritical pastors. These belong outwardly to the
church as “an association of outward ties and rites” (societas externarum
rerum ac rituum). But hidden in this external assembly is “an associ-
ation of faith and of the Holy Spirit in men’s hearts” (societas fidei et
Spiritus Sancti in cordibus), “the inward communion of eternal blessings
in the heart, as of the Holy Ghost, of faith, of the fear and love of God,”
as the German translation by J. Jonas reproduces the Latin text of the
Apology (VII and VIII, 5 [final quotation from Concordia Triglotta,
p..227)):
There are, then, not two churches but the one church, which the
eyes of man see as a congregation or church body, but in which the eyes
of God see those who actually and truly belong to the church—perhaps
only a small group—and are not just “mingled” (admixti, AC VIII) with
it. That is the church proprie dicta, the church in the real sense, in
contrast with the church large dicta,) the church in the broader sense.

51
It is, however, always the one church that is spoken of, whether in the
strict or the wider sense. God’s all-knowing eye recognizes in it the
“association of faith and of the Holy Spirit in men’s hearts.” Our human
eyes see only the “association of outward ties and rites,” but in faith in
the Lord and His promises we know that wherever the means of grace
are, there Christ has His church.

6
What is confessed of the church in the Lutheran Confessions, that
the church is something believed and confessed and not something of
our observation, and that the church is a reality in the world, is basic
for what Article VII says of the unity of the church. As with the church,
so also with the unity of the church: It is an object of faith. As no one
can see the body of Christ, so also no one can see its unity. If we were
to suppose that the whole of Christianity was united in a globe-encircling
organization, on the basis of a constitution and cultus acknowledged by
all, and even if the same could be said of all doctrine, this union would
not yet make the Una Sancta visible. Even in such an “ecumenical
church,” which many today hold up as the ideal, there would be those
who belong to it only externally and are not members of the body of
Christ. Even in such a giant church, including everyone who claims to
be a Christian, the Una Sancta would yet be hidden. It would be just
the same as with any local congregation.
Paul calls the Christians in Corinth “those sanctified in Christ Jesus,
called to be saints.” He speaks of that congregation as “the church of
God which is at Corinth” [1 Cor. 1:2]. These are statements of faith. In
faith he knows that God’s church, the one body of Christ, is there in
that pile of sinners. They are threatening to destroy the communion of
the church, the unity of the body of Christ, with their party strife, these
semi-believers who are so proud of their knowledge (Gnosis) and do not
even know what the Lord’s Supper is and even doubt the resurrection
of the dead. Without contradicting himself Paul can write to this con-
gregation, in which there is so much for him to reproach: “I give thanks
to God always for you because of the grace of God which was given you
in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in Him with all
speech and all knowledge—even as the testimony to Christ was con-
firmed among you.” Because the preaching of Christ is there, and has
created faith, therefore Paul is certain that he who has called them will
surely sustain them to the end (1 Cor. 1:4 ff.). The same is the case with

52
the original church in Jerusalem. Acts speaks of that congregation as
being “of one heart and soul,” and then with striking honesty goes on
to tell of Ananias and Sapphira, who lied to God, and then of the first
dispute in the church, a dispute about money [Acts 4:32; 5:1-11; 6:1].
Even where we experience Christian, brotherly fellowship, “heart
and heart together united,” there too the communion of saints remains
an article of faith, for this communion, the koindnia of which the New
Testament speaks, is a work of the Holy Spirit. It not only binds the
believers together, but it also unites us “with the Father and with His
Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3). The mystery of this communion reaches
into the communion within the Holy Trinity. “The glory which Thou
hast given Me I have given to them, that they may be one even as We
are one, I in them and Thou in Me, that they may become perfectly
one” (John 17:22-23).
This unity is always an object of faith, not of observation, even
though the world may see something of its working: “Behold, how they
love one another.” The Apology describes the Una Sancta with these
words: “ ...men scattered throughout the world who agree on the
Gospel and have the same Christ, the same Holy Spirit, and the same
sacraments, whether they have the same human traditions or not” [Ar-
ticles VII and VIII, 10; Tappert, p. 170]. [Ed. note: Dr. Sasse quotes
both the German and Latin texts, but they are quite similar.] Hidden
under the various church bodies with their different languages and na-
tionalities, constitutions and forms of worship, and other human tra-
ditions, lives the one church. Its unity is also hidden under the divisions
of Christianity. The one church is purely an article of faith, and yet it
is a great reality in the world.

7
The last-quoted passage from the Apology clearly illumines the sec-
ond part of our Article VII:
For it is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church that the
Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and
that the sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine
Word. It is not necessary for the true unity of the Christian church
that ceremonies, instituted by men, should be observed uniformly in
all places. It is as Paul says in Eph. 4:4, 5, “There is one body and
one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to
your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism [Tappert, p. 32; German
text].

53
 There is hardly a passage in our Confessions that has evoked more
discussion than this one, and still today it is in the middle of the debates
and controversies about the church and church unity, about confession
and union, about the rights and wrongs of the modern ecumenical move-
ment.
In our discussions of the first part of Article VII we rejected the
division into visible and invisible church, as though the opening sentence
speaks of the one holy church which continues forever (wna sancta ec-
clesia perpetuo mansura), the invisible church, and the second sentence
speaks of the congregation of the saints congregatio sanctorum, in which
the means of grace are used, the visible church. There is only one church,
of which one can speak in a strict sense or in a wider sense. Thus it is
here. The true unity of the church, of which Article VII speaks, is both
an article of faith and a reality in the world. It is the unity which binds
together all those, wherever they may be in the world from the rising
to the setting of the sun, who truly believe, who have one Christ, one
Holy Spirit, one Gospel, one Baptism, and one Sacrament of the Altar,
whether they have or do not have the same ceremonies or traditions.
They have one Christ and one Holy Spirit because they have one Gospel,
one Baptism, and one Sacrament of the Altar.
That is exactly the thought in Ephesians 4, whose interpretation
is given in Article VII. Also there we find next to one another “one body
and one Spirit . . . one hope. . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one
God and Father” [vv. 4-6]. The one Gospel appears in the words, “just
as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call.” (Compare
Luther’s explanation of the Third Article: “called . . . through the Gos-
pel.”) In and through the means of grace we have the one Lord, the one
Spirit, the one God and Father. Since the means of grace create the
church as the people of God, the body of Christ, the temple of the Holy
Spirit, the congregatio, therefore they are also the marks of the church,
the (notae ecclesiae).
Luther expands the list of the marks of the church. In On the Coun-
cils and the Church he lists the marks by which one can recognize “the
Christian holy people”: the Word of God, Baptism, the Sacrament of
the Altar, the Office of the Keys. “Fifth, the church is recognized ex-
ternally by the fact that it consecrates or calls ministers.” “Sixth, the
holy Christian people are externally recognized by prayer, public praise,
and thanksgiving to God.” “Seventh, the holy Christian people are ex-
ternally recognized by the holy possession of the sacred cross. They
must endure every misfortune and persecution, all kinds of trials and

54
evil from the devil, the world, and the flesh. . . in order to become like
their head, Christ. And the only reason they must suffer is that they
steadfastly adhere to Christ and God’s word, enduring this for the sake
of Christ” (WA 50, 628, 632, 641 f. [American Edition 41, 148, 154, 164
f.]). These additional marks of the church belong with the first. Where
the Word of God, the Gospel, is, there it demands to be preached; so
there must be a ministry. Where the Gospel is, there people must come
together for divine service in order to hear it. Where the Word is, there
the cross must also be; otherwise how could the word of the cross be
taken seriously? Where the Word and the sacraments are, there are
God’s holy people. “For the Word of God is living and active, sharper
than any two-edged sword . . . discerning the thoughts and intentions
of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). It is “like fire . . . and like a hammer which
breaks the rock in pieces” (Jer. 23:29). It has God’s promise that it will
not return empty [Is. 55:10-11]. And Christ’s sacraments are not just
some things that men do. In them Christ Himself is present and active.
Because this is so, therefore the doctrine of Article VII immediately
becomes an assignment, just as in Eph. 4 doctrine and exhortation,
indicative and imperative, go together. Because there is one body and
one Spirit, because you were called by the Gospel to one hope, because
you have received the one Baptism of the one Lord in one faith, therefore
“I... a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the
calling to which you have been called . . . eager to maintain the unity
of the Spirit in the bond of peace” [vv. 1, 3]. So faith in the one church
must immediately lead to eager preservation of that unity. The indic-
ative and imperative go inseparably together also in Article VII. The
great satis est, “it is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church,”
involves a necesse est, it is necessary. As the life of the Christian is
continually threatened by the temptation to sin and to fall away from
the faith, and each day we are to return to our Baptism, daily repent,
so the existence of the church is threatened by the devil, the world, and
the flesh, in which we live also as members of the church. And the church
must daily pray: “Lord Jesus Christ, will you not stay?” Daily, for the
evening of the world draws on, let us plead with the hymn of our fathers
which was so important to us in the church struggle in Germany:
Lord Jesus Christ, will you not stay?
It is now toward the end of day.
Oh, let your Word, that saving light,
Shine forth undimmed into the night.
(Lutheran Worship, 344)

50
Things would be better with the Lutheran Church around the world if
we all, pastors and congregations, in all church bodies called Lutheran,
would pray thus every evening.

8
So then the great article of the Augsburg Confession about the
church is both a confession of firm faith in the indestructibility of the
church and a call quickening our consciences to preserve the unity of
the church and to restore it where it has been lost among us. The Apol-
ogy calls the article of faith about the catholic [or universal] church “very
comforting and highly necessary” [Par. 9, German text; Concordia Trig-
lotta, p. 229]. How often has it not appeared as if the church were done
for? Ne desperemus, “that we may not despair” (Par. 9 [Tappert, p.
170), we are given the great and comforting article of faith in the ac-
tuality of God’s church in the world.
It would be an utter contradiction of all that the Augsburg Confes-
sion says in confessing what God’s Word says, if we would use all this
as a resting ground for our complacency. The confessors of Augsburg
did not rest content with the fact that, despite all that was wrong in
the papacy, the church was still there. They were not content to confess
the profound inner communion of all God’s children which no one can
destroy. They were active in doing what they could to preserve the
unity of outward Christianity. They took up the emperor’s words re-
garding the purpose of their coming together to deal with the questions
of the faith at the Diet, “to live together in unity and in one fellowship
and church, even as we are all enlisted under one Christ” [AC Intro-
duction, 4; Tappert, p. 25].
The question they then had to answer was wherein the true unity
of the church consists. On the basis of God’s Word they confessed that
it is not to be found in unity of traditions or ceremonies but in the one
Gospel and in the sacraments instituted by our Lord. They declined the
false view of the church’s unity which sees this unity in what human
beings have arranged or devised, such as a great constitution or a uni-
form liturgy.
Our church has never taught that in areas such as these there have
to be differences. On the contrary, there have always been efforts to
preserve unity also in these areas. The confessors raised no basic ob-
jection against episcopal polity. They even acknowledged that the office
of the pope was acceptable, if only pope and bishops would honor the

56
Gospel and not set themselves up as more than incumbents of the office
of the Word and the sacraments. There was no objection to adding to
this divine office also the humanly devised office of oversight (episkopé)
over pastors and congregations. What the confessors could not do was
heed the pope and the bishops more than the Word of God.
The Augsburg Confession makes this final declaration:
St. Peter forbids the bishops to exercise lordship as if they had power
to coerce the churches according to their will. It is not our intention
to find ways of reducing the bishops’ power, but we desire and pray
that they may not coerce our consciences to sin. If they are unwilling
to do this and ignore our petition, let them consider how they will
answer for it in God’s sight, inasmuch as by their obstinacy they offer
occasion for division and schism, which they should in truth help to
prevent (AC XXVIII, 76 ff. [Tappert, p. 94)).

Thus the Lutheran Reformation ended with the division of Christendom;

the efforts to preserve unity ended in the separation of those on both
sides who were “all enlisted under one Christ” and so wished to live “in
one fellowship and church,” as was confessed in the introduction of the
Augsburg Confession.
Why was no other outcome possible? We can answer this question
only by referring to the deep mystery of world and church history that,
in this sinful world, where lies are fathered on every hand, what is lie
and what is truth cannot be known if there is no line between them.
Therefore unity in the church is possible only with demarcation against
heresy. Thus when our Lord prayed for the unity of all those who believe
in Him, He also prayed: “Sanctify them in the truth; Thy Word is truth”
[John 17:17]. The apostle John was then a servant of the truth, and so
a servant of the true unity of the church, when he drew the line against
those who denied the Incarnation. This was also the case when the early
church drew the line against Marcion and the Gnostics, Athanasius drew
it against the Arians, Augustine against Pelagius, and Luther against
the pope, Zwingli, and the Anabaptists. So it has ever been with the
church militant in this world. We cannot confess what is true without
rejecting what contradicts it. Kierkegaard observed that truth’s quo-
tation marks are polemical.
And when here on earth the tragic case occurs, which happens again
and again where the question of truth is earnestly engaged, that one
confession of faith is set against another, conscience against conscience,
then we must leave the decision to Him who in the Last Judgment will
finally separate truth from error. We do not know God’s judgments, and

57
can and may not anticipate [Link] when we must speak the dam-
namus (“we condemn”) against a false teaching, God’s forgiving grace
may bring the erring sinner into the church triumphant, where there
is no more untruth. On the other hand, this door will be shut to many
a one who has done battle for the truth in perfect orthodoxy, but has
forgotten that he too was only a poor sinner who lives only by forgiving
grace. Only in God’s light, when we shall no longer “know in part” but
“shall understand fully, even as” we “have been fully understood”
[1 Cor. 13:12]}~—only then, and not before, will we in the full truth of
God also fully understand the true unity of the church.

9
If this, in bold strokes, is the Lutheran doctrine of the church and
its unity, what does this doctrine mean for Lutheranism today? What
tasks does it impose upon us? The first great task is obviously a profound
self-examination. Such an examination was evident in what we cited
above from the assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Conference of
1868. “The wounds we have inflicted upon ourselves in ignorance or
unfaithfulness” are still bleeding, and they have been multiplied in the
decades that have passed since then. In territory after territory Lu-
theranism in Germany has been displaced, until today it lives unambig-
uously only in the free churches. Who is responsible for this?
The Lutherans in the Lutheran territorial churches have gone the
way of the Lutherans in the Union churches who banded together (Ver-
einslutheraner) and committed themselves to confess the Lutheran
faith. They declared that when this or that demand would be made upon
them, that then the occasion for confession (casus confessionis) would
have arrived and they would not yield. But then they did yield, saying
that this was not the right casus confessionis. That is how it went every
time. They gave up one position after another. They claimed they were
indeed always ready to confess; yet when it came to it, they accepted
everything. It was a tragic history, this history of the efforts to recover
the Lutheran Church in Prussia. Many hearts were broken, and not
only because of sorrow over a course of events they could not stop, but
also because of shame at their own failure.
They then set their hope on the territorial churches that were still-
Lutheran: Saxony, Hannover, Bavaria, Wtirttemberg. But even there
what was Lutheran was in rapid decline. One generation ago there was
still a scattering of confessional Lutherans in Wiirttemberg. Where are

58
they today? And what of Hannover and Bavaria? The German Evan-
gelical Church Federation turned out to be what was prophesied by a
shrewd leader of the Union churches. He called it “the sleeping car in
which the Lutherans are traveling into the Union.” It did not have to
be that way, but the man knew the condition of Lutheran confession in
the nominally still Lutheran churches.
There came the year 1933, and with it the German Evangelical
Church, under Nazi compulsion. But who can compel a bishop to deny
his faith? In the following year the Lutheran bishops in Barmen ratified
this church, which for Barth and all the Reformed, for Niemdller and
all the Union people, was a genuine union. Barth called it a confessional
union (Bekenntnisunion).
Then came the day when Hitler’s thousand-year Reich came to an
end. It was the last occasion when the Lutheran bishops in Germany
might have confessed with their deeds. They missed also this oppor-
tunity, and their churches were swallowed up in the new union called
the Evangelical Church in Germany (Evangelische Kirche in Deutsch-
land [EKiD]). In Eisenach, at the foot of the Wartburg, the Lutheran
Church in Germany was buried in 1948. Léhe’s nightmare of the Lu-
theran Church being buried by its own pastors became a reality. From
the sleeping car of the Church Federation it was still possible to get
out. One can leave a Church Federation. From the grave of the EKiD
no one rises [Link] hybrid between federation and church, a fed-
eration which calls itself a church and acts as a church, a church which
would be a federation—“federationist church” (biindische Kirche) they
said in 1983—recognizes no right of secession. The VELKD [Vereinigte
Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche Deutschlands, United Evangelical Lu-
theran Church of Germany], which was formed within the Evangelical
Church in Germany, cannot get out of the larger structure, even if it
wanted to. It does not want to, because it knows it cannot.
Meanwhile the Lutheran churches of the world have been looking
on as spectators. They do not realize that by their being content to be
deedless spectators they seal their own fate. In Sweden the slumbering
conscience of a minority awakened when the demand that women be
ordained was voted approval by a majority of the bishops and the church
assembly. But what was there to do? The state used pressure to bring
it about, and so on every hand we hear lamentation over the tyranny
of the state. The state, however, can point out that the church made
no use of the possibility of rejecting laws decided by the state. Opposition
has been shown by the Assembly for the Church (Kyrklige Samling)

59
and the bishop of Gothenburg, Bo Giertz. They are carrying on the
struggle in exactly the same way as did the Lutherans in Germany and
in the Prussian Union, hoping that, after winter, spring must come.
The rule for the seasons is not, however, the rule in church history. A
confessional church does not happen if one does not actually confess. It
is not enough to work out a casuistry of how pastors and laity are to
react when one of the new priestesses appears in church. Nothing less
will do than taking the stand that all such ordinations are contrary to
God’s Word and invalid, and that all official acts done by these ladies
are done by lay persons. Baptisms done by them stand as those done
by a midwife. Those who walk the corridors of power will not be slow
to react to such a stand. When they apply their disciplinary measures,
there may then be such joy as Gorres expressed in his Athanasius upon
the imprisonment of the archbishop of Cologne: “Praise be to Jesus
Christ; now there is violence!” Thus churches are saved.
Such hope dies when men are silent as our Confession is dismantled
piece by piece, as the place for being a Lutheran in the traditional
structure of the Lutheran Church is constricted more and more, as God’s
Word is set aside. Such silence means the end of the Lutheran Church.
No one would claim it to be a fact that the churches of Germany, Sweden,
Denmark, Norway, and Finland are inwardly held together by “great
unanimity” [AC I, 1] in “the teaching of the Gospel and the adminis-
tration of the sacraments” [ AC VII, 2]. There is no longer a consensus
in these churches regarding what God’s Word demands, what the Gospel
actually is, what Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are. What holds them
together is the setup they have inherited, their constitutions and their
apparatus for running things, their property and the money that the
state provides or collects for them. These are the “human traditions or
rites and ceremonies” [AC VII, 3]. They are not what Article VII of
the Augsburg Confession says creates the true unity of the church.
In the Prussian Union and then in the other churches it was at first
said that what everything really depends on is the preaching of the
Gospel and the administration of the sacraments. It was said that no
pastor was being prevented from preaching the Gospel in truth and
purity and from rightly administering the sacraments [AC VII, 2]. On
the contrary, that was said to be what was desired.
Whatever one may think of the details in Kliefoth’s address in 1868,
he was surely right in rejecting the view that what is said in Article
VII of the Augsburg Confession applies only to pastors, with those who
govern the church excepted. For what else does it mean to govern the

60
affairs of the church than to exercise the pastoral office in/areas that
extend beyond the local congregation? A bishop is one who preaches
and administers the sacraments. He ordains in the name of the church.
He puts the vows to the ordinands that they will be faithful to Scripture
and the Lutheran Confessions. What sort of hypocrisy is it when I ob-
ligate a man to a confession which I myself do not believe! That is what
used to go on in Prussia, although today it is generally regarded as
intolerable. It was the way of the Prussian Union also in the Rhineland,
in areas where there were both Lutherans and Reformed. Those who
were training to be teachers of religion had to learn both Luther’s Cat-
echism and the Heidelberg Catechism so that they could teach the one
or the other as needed. And what of those training to be pastors, when
they are taught by men who do not confess their church’s confession?
What of their preaching of the Gospel and administration of the sac-
raments, and their ordination vow?
Let no one say that confession is not mentioned in Article VII as
a mark of the church. No, not expressly. But what is a confession if it
is no longer the declaration of the church: This is what we believe, teach,
and confess, because it is the true doctrine of the Gospel, because it is
Biblical truth to be preached from every pulpit!
If our fathers of 1868 could speak to us today, what a preaching of
repentance that would be for the whole Lutheran Church, or what is
left of it.

10
This call to repentance would go out not only to the Lutherans of
Germany and Europe, but certainly to them first. They allowed the
Lutheran Church to disappear as church in one territory after another
until little more is left than a viewpoint or a school of thought in the-
ology—until this also dies. For schools of thought in theology soon pass
away; they disappear with their teachers and leaders. Is it conceivable
that ever again in Sweden, and perhaps also in Denmark and Norway,
a man might become a professor or a bishop if he saw the ordination of
women as defection from the Word of God? Is there any German uni-
versity today where men would be tolerated who reject the Unions,
including those of Barmen in 1933 and 1934, and the Evangelical Church
in Germany (EKiD) in 1948, declaring them not only false in theory but
actually breaking off fellowship with such Union churches? Such ques-
tions can be put in ways appropriate to each of the European state and

61
territorial churches, also where they are no longer governed directly
by the state, but where the church authorities are at the pleasure of
the mass of indifferent and nominal church members. It is the tragic
but irreversible outcome of European church history: A state church
can no longer be a confessional church. But a church can be Lutheran
only as it is a confessional church.
This is a fact for our brothers in the faith in America to ponder.
Are they even aware of it? Do they recognize the great crisis of the
church of the Lutheran Confession? If one looks closely at the Lutheran
churches in America and studies their development, one finds little
awareness of the crisis. Where was their witness in 1933 and 1934 to
warn and to encourage us? What was their witness in 1948? Many sat
by quietly; they thought it unloving to get mixed up in the affairs of
other churches. The representatives of the Missouri Synod felt they
should not repeat the mistakes of earlier times and give criticism that
was not always well informed or loving. But it is never a service of love
if one does not help a sick man out of his sickness, but says to him that
all is well. We are all responsible for one another, we who have before
God and the whole church confessed the Unaltered Augsburg Confession
or the Book of Concord. We are not unknown to each other. Most of
the Lutheran churches in America are members together with the Eu-
ropean Lutheran churches in the Lutheran World Federation. They see,
or they ought to see, what is going on there. They cannot but see how
the Confessions have become little more than a formality for many. They
cannot be ignorant of what is taught in the member churches. Have
things gone so far that our American brothers in the faith recognize the
ordination of women? Or is this to be regarded as an internal matter
for each church by itself? What has been heard from the Lutheran
churches of America as they have watched one church after another
welcomed into membership in the Federation, some of whom do not call
themselves Lutheran, some who quickly put on the name? Subscription
to the constitution of the Federation may be lightly done; many churches
have no intention of considering the doctrine of the Augsburg Confession
as that doctrine, and no other, which is to be preached and taught, have
no commitment to guard this doctrine or repudiate what contradicts it.
Such a commitment might honestly be expected. No one can expect
that all pastors become paragons of Lutheran confession and preaching
by tomorrow. In every church there is weakness and theological igno-
rance. Yet of those churches which declare that they are Lutheran one
can expect that they will learn, live, and grow from the resources of

62
the Lutheran Confessions, and so will become what they confess them-
selves to be. The sickness at the heart of the Lutheran World Federation
is the untruthfulness which appears symptomatically in so many of its
decisions. For too many modern church leaders, church politics comes
first, and then the Confessions become a tool of church politics.
This is what the Lutherans of America should have seen. Why did
they not notice it? A hundred years ago they saw such things quite
clearly. The ’60s of the last century saw a great decision in American
Lutheranism. It is connected with the name of Samuel Simon Schmucker
(1799—1873). He was the first president of the first Lutheran seminary
in America (Gettysburg, founded in 1826), and he held that office for
four decades. He was prominent in the General Synod, a product of the
pletistic and unionistic Lutheranism in Pennsylvania influenced by Au-
gust Hermann Francke. In general American church history he is known
as one of the prophets of the Ecumenical Movement in the United States.
He is the father of what was called “federative union,” a combination
of churches that retain their identity and yet enter into church fellow-
ship. For such a combination with the Reformed, the Methodists, and
other Protestants, he wrote a confession of 12 articles. It was composed
of pieces taken from the Anglican articles, the Methodist Discipline,
Lutheran and Reformed confessions, and from the articles of the Breth-
ren. His influence in the efforts to achieve church unions in America
seems to have been greater than was formerly supposed. He is one of
those who prepared the way for today’s National Council of the Churches
of Christ in the U.S.A.
In Lutheranism he is not highly regarded. In 1854 he published his
Definite Platform, a watered-down Augsburg Confession from which
the specifically Lutheran doctrines had been removed. His goal was an
“American Lutheranism,” indigenous and living in harmonious fellow-
ship with the Reformed Churches. At this all the Lutheran synods, also
his own, turned away from him. Whatever differences there were among
them, here they stood united: They would not let themselves be robbed
of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession. That was the great decision
which happened in the ’60s only a hundred years ago.
Could something like that happen now? The situation is again
fraught with heavy debate of weighty church issues. Is it possible to
repeat what was done a hundred years ago? And if it did happen again,
would it be more than an action of church politics in which for practical
reasons an old confession would once more be formally affirmed without
thereby making a decision of faith? To accept a confession, when this

63
is seriously done, means to make a decision about what is believed, for
the individual and for the church body. .
Do we still understand our ordination that way? When a congre-
gation or church in America espouses the Augsburg Confession, is this
still understood in the sense of a decision as to what is believed? Or
have things gone so far also among the Lutherans of America that the
church’s confession is only something that has to be said if you are
writing up a constitution? To be sure, the Confessions should be pre-
served, and why not? Who would want to throw out such a precious old
piece of furniture? If the Anglicans pledge all their ministers to the
Thirty-Nine Articles, the Presbyterians to the Westminster Confession,
and Roman Catholics to the Profession of Faith of the Council of Trent,
why should we Lutherans not do the same with the Unaltered Augsburg
Confession? There was once in Oxford a wise and much-honored An-
glican churchman. When he was asked how he could accept the Thirty-
Nine Articles along with his Catholic convictions, he replied, “I also
accept the gas company of Oxford, but I do not approve of it.”
Have we Lutherans also reached this level of wisdom, resignation,
or despair? In any case, this is something we ought to be quite clear
about: Our church was the last of the Reformation churches still loyal
to its Confessions. For innumerable Christians the Augsburg Confession
has been truly their confession. If it should now sink to the level of being
only a historical document, a formality to be put in a constitution, then
we ought to know that the Profession of Faith of the Council of Trent
and the doctrine of the Vatican Council will continue to stand as the
confession of innumerable millions of human beings. There the faith
confessed at the Reformation is included—but among the false doctrines
that are put under the anathema!
That the foregoing picture is not overdrawn is clear from the facts
which are there for anyone to see. In America the Lutherans are now
mostly in three large groups. The Lutheran Church in America is putting
itself together out of the United Lutheran Church, the Augustana
Church (Swedish origins), plus one formerly Danish and another Finnish
church. That adds up to one third of the Lutherans. This church char-
acterizes itself by its participation not only in the Lutheran World Fed-
eration but also in the World Council of Churches and in the National
Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., in which American
Protestantism finds its unity. The churches in the middle are now united
in The American Lutheran Church (The ALC). This church also belongs
to the World Council of Churches, but not yet to the National Council

64
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. With the first-named church it
forms the National Lutheran Council.
In all these churches there are still faithful Lutherans. To what
extent they form a viewpoint that has become a minority is not clear.
Those from the former Evangelical Lutheran Church who took their
confession seriously were not able to halt the entry of the new American
Lutheran Church into the World Council of Churches. What the “left”
[LCA] and the “center” [The ALC] have in common in spite of all existing
differences is that they recognize all the European state and territorial
churches, even the most liberal, and beyond what is Lutheran extend
their recognition to churches that in fact operate as Union churches.
They work together with all of them in the Lutheran World Federation.
Beyond that, they acknowledge the World Council of Churches and work
with it, holding prominent positions. To what extent the confessional
consciousness of these churches has been shattered is shown by every
issue of their church papers, every decision these churches make. The
number of pastors whose pledge to the Book of Concord is without
reservation (quia) becomes less from year to year; or if they do it, they
do not know what that means. Among the young pastors in all these
churches there is a growing discussion of the question whether the old
Confessions can still be accepted as their fathers accepted them a gen-
eration or two ago. It is openly stated that this is no longer possible.
What is happening here is tied up with the loss of the doctrine of
Holy Scripture as the Word of God inspired by the Holy Spirit. Those
on the left no longer dare say that Scripture is the Word of God, as is
evidenced by the explanation accompanying the union documents. The
old doctrine is still there in the constitution of The American Lutheran
Church; those who did not want it there kept quiet so as not to hinder
the union. Pietism once made its way through Europe traveling from
west to east, from one church to another, undermining the doctrinal
substance of the confessional churches, and so preparing the way for
the Rationalism that brought the dissolution of the Christian faith. Sim-
ilarly we may observe the deadly disease of a new, doctrinally indifferent
Enthusiasm running its course in America. It draws strength from re-
ligious and intellectual thought in the United States and from the ever-
more-powerful Ecumenical Movement. We know enough about such
spiritual epidemics from the history of our own time! The sickness which
has ravaged Lutheranism in the Eastern states now takes its course in
the Midwest, traditionally a fortress of confessional Lutheranism. Iowa

65
and Ohio have already fallen victim to it; the symptoms are evident in
their faculties.
Now the sickness rages in Missouri, and unless there are signs and
wonders this last great church of confessional Lutheranism will suc-
cumb. The churches of the left and the middle are simply waiting for
Missouri. They see that the Synodical Conference with its continual
internal tensions cannot last much longer, and their hope is that Missouri
will then move into the National Lutheran Council, and from there into
the Lutheran World Federation and the World Council of Churches. No
one can tell what would then happen with the remaining Lutheranism
(Wisconsin, the Norwegians, and the Slovaks of the Synodical Confer-
ence), or what might split off from Missouri and from other churches.
Everything is waiting for the fall of Missouri. Then the way would finally
be open for a Lutheran world church without a confession.

11
Without a confession? Yes, without a confession. For what most
Lutherans in America understand by a confession is not what the con-
fessing Lutheran Church has always understood by that term. Rather
it is what Schmucker meant by it, what Dr. Fry and perhaps most of
the leaders of world Lutheranism mean by it: sentences in which Chris-
tians or churches express the convictions they share. It is indeed im-
portant to know how much we share. This is especially true in this time
of chaos in churches and theologies. We must know what we share with
others, and what we do not share. We must pursue serious doctrinal
discussion with those from whom we are separated, in order that on the
basis of Holy Scripture we may be brought to one common doctrine.
Such theses, however, are still no confession. To suppose that they
are is a notion which can be traced back to a fatal misunderstanding of
Article VII that one encounters again and again. It goes something like
this: For church unity it is enough “to agree concerning the teaching of
the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments” (consentire de
doctrina evangelii et de administratione sacramentorum). If we find
that we agree with others regarding our understanding of the Gospel
and the administration of the sacraments, then we can establish church
fellowship with them. This may happen church with church, or even
congregation with congregation and individual with individual. This last
comes under the heading of “selective fellowship,” as it is called in Amer-
ica. Two pastors or congregations of different churches who live together

66
in one place find that they believe the same, and on the basis of this
consensus they enter upon church fellowship with each other. Since
tomorrow one or both of the pastors may be called elsewhere and the
makeup of the congregations is changing, this means the atomizing of
the church. This is especially the case when both sides are weak in faith
and theology. What is regarded as a consensus in doctrine may in fact
be a consensus of ignorance and poverty of doctrine. There are even
those who suppose that they can establish degrees of unity. The degrees
match the level of agreement reached so far in the discussions. The
consensus one tries to read out of Article VII is in all such cases a purely
human arrangement.
It is aremarkable fact that until quite recently there was no trans-
lation of the German text of the Augsburg Confession, or at least not
one that was widely known. The English text of the Concordia Triglotta,
the three-language edition of the Book of Concord, takes into account
both the German and the Latin versions in the case of all the other
confessions, but not so with the Augsburg Confession. Here only the
Latin goes into the English text. In the English translation of the Book
of Concord which was recently published in Philadelphia [the Tappert
Edition], a translation is given of both the Latin and the German versions
of the Augsburg Confession. The German version, however, has not
been quite fully understood. The great “It is enough” (satis est) is clearly
directed against Rome. For the unity of the church Rome required more
than unity in the faith; it required the acceptance of human traditions
and ceremonies. Satis est does not then postulate a minimum of agree-
ment, a consensus, which we achieve in the course of our discussions,
but a maximum: “. . . that [with one accord, evntrdchtiglich] the Gospel
be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the
sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine Word” [italics
Dr. Sasse’s]. Not the agreement in doctrine—the Roman church has a
consensus in doctrine, the Baptists also have one; every church has some
sort of consensus, even if it is a consensus in agreeing that doctrine is
not important—but only the consensus in the pure doctrine and in the
right administration of the sacraments is the consensus demanded in the
Augsburg Confession. That is the “great unanimity” (magnus consen-
sus) with which the first article of the Augsburg Confession begins, a
consensus not made by men but given by God, the consensus in the right
faith, which only the Holy Spirit creates.
If it were only a human consensus, then the doctrinal decisions of
the Confession would have validity only for Lutheran Churches. Then

67
it would only claim to be the doctrine of a particular church, just as
other churches have their own particular confessions. There is nothing
of this said anywhere in the Book of Concord. It has no notion of any
such thing as a Lutheran Church. We do not believe in the Lutheran
Church, but in the one, holy, catholic [or universal] church. The Book
of Concord actually became the confession of a particular church. It was
first called Evangelical, then Evangelical Lutheran, and also Lutheran.
But that only came as a consequence of the way things developed in the
Reformation’s history. It was a consequence of the church division which
could not be stopped.
We believe that the true church is wherever the Gospel is still heard
and where Christ’s sacraments are present. Thus the archconfessionalist
Philipp Nicolai believed that Christ’s church was present among the
Muscovites, the Ethiopians, and in the churches of the Jesuits in Amer-
ica [Werner Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism, pp. 391 ff., Note 8].
But to establish church fellowship with those who mix this Gospel with
false doctrine, that we cannot do, not even with Lutherans who deny
the faith of their fathers, as little as Philipp Nicolai could have church
fellowship with the Muscovites and the Jesuits.
This does not mean that our Confession can claim to have some sort
of infallibility. It does not mean that all Christians must first accept the
Book of Concord before we can have church fellowship with them. We
are bound together with the true church of all ages in the great consensus
of what is believed, taught, and confessed, also with those who did not
yet have or need an Augsburg Confession. We are also bound up in the
unity of the true church with those who after us will confess the true
faith even to the end of the world, whether they use the words of our
Confession or say it in other ways. But it must be the same faith, for
there is only one Gospel. This faith embraces the great Biblical truths
which were set down in our Confession in defense against false doctrine
and in obedience to the Lord who looks to us all to confess His everlasting
truth, until He confesses before His heavenly Father those who have
confessed Him and His Gospel in this world.
Evening is falling also upon the Lutheran Church. But in the eve-
ning the Lord of His church is perhaps most near.

68
 MINISTRY AND ©

CONGREGATION
Letters to Lutheran Pastors, No. 8
July 1949

1
One of the most grievous events in the history of the Lutheran Church
in the 19th century was the fact that the two great churchmen Wilhelm
Lohe and Ferdinand Walther went separate ways after the great the-
ological leader of the Missouri Synod had in 1851 had a most promising
meeting with Léhe in Neuendettelsau.
That the theological faculty at Erlangen had small regard for both
of them means little. However great the achievements of the old Er-
langen School, however great its representatives as men and as scholars,
there was yet a weakness there which rendered them incapable of being
a resource for a lasting renewal of the Lutheran Church. They were
unable to hold themselves clear of the insidious poison of Schleiermach-
erian subjectivism. Although they were dedicated to discern and defend
the objective truths of revelation, Schleiermacher’s way of doing the-
ology had infected and weakened them. What at the time was already
recognized by some clear-sighted men became only too obvious by the
end of the century. If “I the Christian am to me the theologian the most
proper matter of my study” [J. C. K. von Hofmann of the Erlangen
School, Schriftbeweis, I, 10], then no power on earth could keep theology
from becoming a study of things in man, a “science of religion.”
The other great weakness of the Erlangen School was their being
so bound up in the little world of Germany’s territorial churches. Their
horizon reached from their small town in Franconia toward the south
as far as Niirnberg and Munich, and northwards to Leipzig, Dresden,
Rostock, and even as far as Dorpat [Tartu in Estonia]. How vastly
farther-reaching was the vision and engagement of the little village
pastor in Neuendettelsau. How much more clearly Lohe and Walther

69
saw what faced the Lutheran Church in the world—beyond a Lutheran
Church run by a bureaucracy that was watched over and guided by the
state. For them the church was not just a department of the state. No
one could imagine that out of the laborious work of organizing these
congregations on the fringes of civilization would come the great
churches in whose hands, so far as it lies in human hands, today rests
the future of Lutheranism. So also no one could foresee the consequences
of the break between Walther and Léhe, between Missouri and Iowa.
We see these consequences today and are faced with the question
whether the agreement which failed to happen at that time might come
in our day.

2
What separated Lohe and Walther, and so what separated Missouri
and Iowa, was not by any means only the relationship between church
and ministry, but this was certainly a primary point in which they could
not find agreement. Nor was it a matter which separated only these
two men and the churches they represented. The separation ran right
through Lutheranism. In the second third of the 19th century Lutherans
were drawn, in their own way, into the deep-going discussion which at
that time involved all of Christendom, from the Roman Catholics before
the Vatican I to the strangest sects of the Reformed world (for instance
the Irvingites and the Disciples of Christ), and profoundly affected An-
glicanism.
One can at first only marvel that Lutheranism could have been so
disturbed by this question, even to the point of causing divisions in the
Prussian Free Church and her daughter church in Australia. For the
Lutheran Church, matters of church government belong to the adia-
phora, to the “rites and ceremonies, instituted by men” (Augsburg
Confession VII), concerning which there may and must be freedom in
the church. Christ is not the legislator of a human religious fellowship,
and the Gospel has in it no law which prescribes the only right way of
organization and polity for the church.
One must be clear as to what this means. Other churches have “an
order by which the Lord wills the church to be governed,” as Calvin
put it [Institutes, 4, 3, 1; LCC 41, 1053]. This is true of all Catholic
churches, both of the East and of the West, and of all Reformed
churches. Their differences have to do only with what that order must
be—the universal monarchy of the pope, the episcopal-synodical gov-

70
ernment of the church as in the Eastern churches and Anglicanism, a
ruling senate of presbyters among whom there must be no differences
of rank, or the autonomy of the individual congregation as in Congre-
gationalism and among the Baptists. These are just a few notable op-
tions, all of which claim to represent what the New Testament requires
for the polity of the church.
Luther’s entire greatness and the boldness of his basic theological
principle of the strict separation of Law and Gospel become evident
when one sees how beyond all these possibilities he goes his lonesome
way: Christ gave His church no such law prescribing one right orga-
nization, government, and polity (de constituenda ecclesia). Any way
of organizing things may do, so long as the means of grace are going on
and are not frustrated.
One thing the Lord gave His church, however, belongs not only to
its well-being bene esse but to its very being esse: “In order that we
may obtain this faith, the ministry of teaching the Gospel and admin-
istering the sacraments was instituted,” says Article V of the Augsburg
Confession. In order that we may obtain the justifying faith of which
the previous article has spoken, the Gospel must be preached, the sac-
raments must be administered. Therefore God has instituted the min-
istry, the service through which this happens. Wherever the means of
grace are rightly administered, there God fulfills His promise that the
Word will not return empty, there faith is created, there is the church,
the congregation of saints, of justified sinners.
How the congregation organizes itself, for this no prescriptions are
given, just as there are none for how the church’s ministry is to be
organized. The apostles came to recognize that it would be helpful for
their ministry if they were relieved of the work of caring for the poor
and attending to money matters. So the office of the deacons was created
as an auxiliary office. But the church was the church already before this
office was created. So the church can at any time create auxiliary offices
to meet the needs of the time. Examples of this in the history of the
church are the office of an episcopate, or superintendency, or any other
offices, whatever they may be called. But all these offices have their
right of existence only insofar as they serve the one great office of the
preaching of the Gospel and the administering of the sacraments. A
bishop may be entrusted with the task of seeing to the running of a
great diocese. But the meaning of such an assignment can only consist
in this, that he thereby gives room and support to the church’s ministry.
His actual office is the office of pastor, also when he is a pastor for

pal
pastors. By human arrangement he may have the work of superinten-
dency. By divine mandate he has solely the office of preaching the for-
giveness and justification of sinners for Christ’s sake.

3
If this is something on which there is agreement in the whole Lu-
theran Church, if the Lutheran Church can live with a consistorial or
an episcopal constitution, if, as in America, it can live with a presby-
terial-synodical or sometimes even an almost completely congregational
organization, how are we to explain the differences of opinion which
exactly in the question of ministry and congregation, and thereby in the
question of church organization, have repeatedly split our church since
Léhe and Walther went their separate ways?
This is a hard question to answer. It seems to me there is no doubt
that Lutheranism was infiltrated by the organization and polity problems
of other churches and confessions. No church in the 19th century was
able to stay clear of such problems. We have only to name Mohler,
Newman, Pusey, Vinet, and Chalmers. All confessions of Christendom
were affected. It was a time when the old Christian Europe seemed to
be coming to an end, and the question was what would take its place.
We Lutherans have much to learn from the passionate struggle of
Roman Catholicism to be free from the fetters of the state shaped by
the Enlightenment. This church’s struggle, for instance in Cologne, has
instructive parallels with the confessional battle of the Prussian Lu-
therans, just as later the brave struggle of the Hessian Renitenz [a
confessional Lutheran movement] has parallels to the Kulturkampf at
the time of Bismarck. We do well to study the tragic story of the Trac-
tarian Movement in England, the gripping history of the Disruption in
Scotland, and parallel movements on the other side of the Atlantic
Ocean.
With all of this going on, Lutheranism did not remain wholly true
to the glorious freedom of the Reformation. If everywhere the question
was being urged as to what is the authentic way of organizing the church,
the way prescribed by Christ, the way required by the Bible, then our
church was caught in the danger of wanting to give an answer to this
question. With all their faithfulness to the Lutheran Confessions, neither
Walther nor Lohe (to name just these two) succeeded in escaping this
danger.
It is similar to what happened with our classical dogmaticians in
the Age of Orthodoxy. They were drawn into answering questions which

72
came from Calvinism or Roman Catholicism, without recognizing that
these were falsely put. Take for example the question of the Visible and
invisible church, which still continues to plague us. The fathers in the
Age of Orthodoxy, as well as the fathers in the 19th century, were drawn
into Reformed terminology on this question. They failed to recognize
that Luther’s ecclesia abscondita [cf. “The Church is hidden” (WA 18,
652; American Edition 33, 89)] is not quite the same as the ecclesia
imvisibilis [“invisible church”] of the Reformed. The Lutheran dogma-
ticians would therefore have done better to have kept to the expressions
used in the Confessions and by Luther. To be sure, when we confess
the church we are not confessing what we see (Sehartikel) but what we
believe (Glaubensartikel). Our eyes cannot now see the church as the
kingdom of Christ. As the Apology confesses (along with Luther) in
expounding Articles VII and VIII of the Augsburg Confession, it is
“hidden under the cross” (sub cruce tectum [18]). No human eye sees
the church as the body of Christ. It is an eschatological fact which must
be differentiated from the “association of outward ties and rites” (so-
cietas externarum rerum ac rituum [Apology VII and VIII, 5]) which
we see. Insofar as this is so, the church may be spoken of as invisible.
The expression “invisible church,” however, comes from Augustine
freighted with his ecclesiology, and further freight has been loaded onto
it by Reformed theology. There are things here which we do not and
cannot confess.
Why did they not stay with Luther’s simple teaching of the “hidden”
church? Here, as in some other points, our orthodox dogmaticians al-
lowed themselves to become far too dependent on their opponents, and
the theologians of the 19th century simply took this over. After all, they
had no better Lutheran books of dogmatics than those from the Age of
Orthodoxy. Where could they have found any such?
There is also something else to be considered. It is certainly true,
as the Smalceald Articles confess, that “a seven-year-old child knows
what the church is, namely, holy believers and sheep who hear the voice
of their shepherd” (III, XII, 2). And yet the theologians of the last
century were correct in expecting (as A. Vilmar repeatedly expressed
it) that they might be led more deeply into the doctrine of the church
as they were called upon to face the colossal catastrophes in the political
and social life of their day and the impending future. From the beginning
the church knew all that is confessed in the Nicene Creed, but it was
by way of the gigantic struggle against ancient heathenism that the
church of antiquity came to confess with such clarity that Jesus Christ

73
is truly God and truly man. It is only in this way, and in no other, that
we may speak of advance in the understanding of the faith.
Why the two great Lutheran streams in the last century did not
flow together was clearly seen by Vilmar: The Lutheran Church had
not yet come to full clarity as to what the articles in the Augsburg
Confession about the church mean for the life of the church. So it came
about that the great Lutherans of the last century left us a heritage not
yet exhausted or made our own. This is especially true of those who did
not just sit at their desks and think theoretically about the nature of
the church, but were actively engaged in gathering and caring for con-
gregations. The task which is given our generation cannot be to repeat
the formulations of both sides and to take up the discussion where it
came to a stop a century ago. Rather our task is again to think through
what at that time remained unresolved. For this task we have the help
of what the church has experienced since then and of what may have
been given of deeper insight into the teachings of Holy Scripture.

4
It is truly remarkable how modern historical research into the be-
ginnings of the way the church was organized has confirmed Luther’s
exegetical insight that the New Testament tells of no specific single way
of organizing the church, and so no such single way can be canonized.
As in the history of the liturgy so also in the history of the church’s
organization, the beginning was marked not by uniformity but by di-
versity. Therefore it was also possible to read into the New Testament
the most diverse ways of organizing the church, and then to derive
satisfaction in discovering them there!
Thus the doctrine of papal primacy was read [Link] Peter pas-
sages, although it had grown out of quite unbiblical soil. What Acts 15
tells us of the meeting of the council in Jerusalem has been burdened
with the theory of the infallible synod, whose roots are not to be found
in Scripture but in ancient sociology. The Catholic doctrine that while
one may err but that all together cannot err is a notion that runs through
the ancient world, from the Stoics right on to Mohammed. What do
Calvin’s presbyters have in common with the presbyters of the New
Testament? What does “the church of God which is at Corinth” have in
common with what Congregationalists nowadays understand by “con-
gregation”? Paul would simply not be able to understand what the doc-
trine of the body of Christ as expressed in Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici

74
Corporis has to do with what he teaches of the church as the body of
Christ.
It is not surprising, then, that there is some uncertainty throughout
Christendom as to the Scripturalness of the various church polities.
Among the Reformed we no longer find the same certainty with which
Calvin was able to find in the Bible “the order by which the Lord wills
the church to be governed.” We hear rather of a few basic lines laid
down there that are viewed as obligatory (a presbytery as church senate
or council of brothers, a synod as the final court of appeal, rejection of
the office of bishop—even when, as in Hungary, this title is used because
of state-church considerations). Even in Catholic dogmatics we find the
attempt being made to soften the stark statements of Trent and Vatican
I in order to bring them more into harmony with the historical facts
recorded in the New Testament.
In this respect M. Schmaus’s Katholische Dogmatik (1964) is most
instructive. He observes “that Paul can describe the celebration of the
Eucharist without any express mention of a particular priesthood (1
Cor. 11:17-84),” and then continues, “It is an action of the whole con-
gregation in Corinth” (IV, 1, 728). After reading what the same dog-
matician says so splendidly about the priestly character of the church
(the priesthood of all believers), what he says about the special priest-
hood obtrudes like a foreign body in the whole context of his presen-
tation. In support of the priesthood of all Christians numerous Bible
passages are given; in support of the particular priesthood not a single
one. There could not be a more convincing presentation of the unbiblical
character of the Roman Catholic doctrine of the priesthood.
At another place we read of the relationship between presbyters
and bishops: “The New Testament terms presbyteroi and episcopor do
not yet express different levels of order as do our words ‘priest’ and
‘bishop,’ which derive from these Greek designations. The separation
of the one office, referred to with two names, meets us first in Ignatius
of Antioch. Here for the first time we have clearly the division into three
orders (deacons, priests, bishops). This may be traced back to about the
year 100. Its seeds lie in the apostolic period” (p. 729). So only its seeds!
To say it bluntly, the Catholic hierarchy is not yet there in the New
Testament. At most it is a development of New Testamental seeds.
Here we see how cautious a Catholic theologian, strictly bound to Roman
dogma, has become when he deals with the Biblical foundations of the
Roman doctrine regarding how the church must be constituted (Kir-
chenverfassung).

79
 Today no one who takes seriously the Scriptural evidence would be
so rash as to assert that there is to be found in the New Testament a
set way of organizing the church which is obligatory for all time. This
fact would surely be acknowledged by the Lutherans of the 19th century,
although in their day they were not able altogether to resist the temp-
tation to find an answer to the question as to how the church must be
organized, even though they hedged their answers with all kinds of
reservations and provisos. Today they would simply bow before the fact
that in the church of the New Testament there were several possible
ways of ordering the holy ministry and the church, the congregation of
saints.

5)

Which has the primacy, ministry or congregation? Is the office the

product of the congregation, or is the congregation the product of the
office? Léhe stood for the office, and in a different way also Vilmar and
Kliefoth. Walther stood for the congregation. (Von Hofling does not fit
in here; neither side took him seriously, and despite all his other ac-
complishments, he did not make a serious contribution in this matter.)
There is more to this than is suggested by likening it to the question
whether the hen comes from the egg or the egg from the hen. What is
involved here is in fact of enormous theological importance. The entire
understanding of the church depends on it.
When Walther and Missouri contended for the priority of the con-
gregation, they could justly call on Luther and the old Lutheran Church
as witnesses. In his To the Christian Nobility Luther gives the following
well-known illustration of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.
Some Christians find themselves in the desert. There is no ordained
priest among them. They elect one of their number to the holy ministry.
By this election he has whatever rights and responsibilities belong to
one who occupies the church’s ministry (WA 6, 407 [American Edition
44, 128)).
We may compare the certainty with which Luther speaks here with
the uncertainty and indecision with which Thomas More dealt with the
same problem a few years earlier in his Utopia. After an account of the
tolerant Enlightenment religion of the Utopians and its kinship with
Christianity as the enlightened humanist understood it, he relates that
many joined their religion and were baptized. Then he continues: “There
was unfortunately no priest. Initiated into everything else, they further

76
desired those sacraments which, among us, are conferred by none but
a priest. Yet they understand them and desire them with the greatest
eagerness. They zealously disputed among themselves whether, without
the authority of the Christian pontiff, one selected out of their number
might attain the character of the priesthood. It seemed likely that they
would have such an election, but, to tell the truth, they had not yet
done so by the time I departed” (Lupton, pp. 269 f.). Such is the un-
certainty with which the humanist speaks, the friend of Erasmus, the
Englishman not prone to making decisions in matters of doctrine. It
follows quite naturally and logically that this early representative of
Enlightenment religion was executed as a martyr for papal primacy,
and in our day has been canonized as a protagonist of the papacy.
The question whether such isolated Christians as pictured by Lu-
ther and by More can, as a Christian congregation, rightfully put aman
into the office of the holy ministry reveals whether a person thinks
evangelically or not. There has never been an evangelical theologian
who basically disagreed with Luther in such a case, not even A. Vilmar,
the most “high church” among the Lutherans of last century, and cer-
tainly not Léhe. Vilmar regarded the situation put by Luther as rather
fanciful, as a borderline case that could scarcely occur in real life. But
should such a case actually occur, then he would agree with Luther that
the congregation has the right to act as they did in Luther’s story. And
so Vilmar remains within the boundary drawn by the Evangelical faith.
[He says:] “In situations of necessity, such as when little congregations
(ecclesiolae) are cut off without contact, they can indeed have one from
among them be their emergency shepherd (Nothirte). Although this is
possible, it does smack of storytelling. But never may such a case be
used to establish the regular way of doing things” (Die Lehre vom
geistlichen Amt, p. 74).
The regular way in Vilmar as in Lohe is that shepherds are ordained
by shepherds, which is also regarded as the normal thing in the Confes-
sions of the Lutheran Church and its church orders. Here our church
expressly acknowledges the ancient catholic practice. The church of the
Lutheran Reformation, however, has never been in doubt regarding the
possibility of the office being bestowed without the traditional ordination
by an ordained servant of the Word. Herein is agreement also among
all those who do not simply regard the exercise of the holy ministry as
the priesthood of all believers performing its function. What makes a
priest a priest is the offering of sacrifices. In the New Testamental and
Evangelical sense this means the bringing of the spiritual offerings of

77
the whole church [1 Peter 2:5]. The preaching of the Gospel and the
administering of the sacraments are connected, to be sure, with such
spiritual sacrifices, but they are not in themselves the functions of a
priest.

6
That the great freedom of the Reformation is truly the freedom of
the Gospel is shown by the fact that the Office of the Keys is given three
times in the New Testament: in Matthew 16 to Peter, in John 20 to all
the apostles, in Matthew 18 to the whole church. These three bestowals
of the office may not be separated. One may not be selected as the chief
one, and then played off against the others. To the Twelve Jesus gave
the office of preaching the Gospel to every creature and making disciples
of all nations by baptizing them. To them He gave the mandate at the
Last Supper: “Do this in remembrance of Me.” Who were the Twelve?
They were the first ministers (Amtstrdger). From them proceeds “the
ministry of teaching the Gospel and administering the sacraments” [AC
5]. But they are at the same time the church, the ekklésia, the repre-
sentatives of God’s new people of the end time.
It is therefore in fact impossible in the New Testament to separate
ministry and congregation. What is said to the congregation is also said
to the office of the ministry, and vice versa. The office does not stand
above the congregation, but always in it. In Acts 13 Paul and Barnabas
are sent out as missionaries by the congregation in Antioch. They were
already sent by the Lord. What more could this congregation give to
Paul with the laying on of hands than what he had already received by
the direct commissioning of the risen Lord, who appointed him to his
work? Nevertheless the sending is quite deliberately repeated with the
laying on of hands. Office and congregation belong inseparably together.
Church history confirms this. Only where there is a vital ministerial
office, working with the full authority of having been sent, only there
is a living congregation. And only where there is a living congregation
is there a living ministerial office. Vilmar’s pessimism about the con-
gregation can be explained by the fact that he did not yet know a living
congregation. . . . [We omit a few sentences in which Dr. Sasse deplores
the lack of living congregations in German Protestantism.] Of all Lu-
theran churches there can hardly be another in which the office of the
ministry is so highly honored as in the Missouri Synod, where the con-
gregation is so much the center of churchly thinking and activity. Office

78
and congregation are piped together. The life of the one is also the life
of the other. If the office falters, so does the congregation. If the con-
gregation falters, so does the office.
Already for this reason the alternative “ministry or congregation?”
in the 19th century was falsely put. Léhe himself saw this, by the way,
as Hebart has shown in his illuminating book about him. What was
lacking was the strength to draw the consequences of this recognition,
and instead there was misapprehension in diagnosing what lay behind
the other’s position. The position taken by Missouri had nothing to do
with the American propensity to do things democratically, as Mundinger
has shown in his penetrating study Government in the Missouri Synod.
After all, Walther and those like-minded with him were all antidemo-
crats. And Hebart has shown that no conservative political notions dis-
torted the concept of the church for Lohe, who was never so dominated
by nationalistic motives as were Bezzel and the later representatives of
Neuendettelsau. On both sides there was an overemphasis on one aspect
of Biblical truths which in the New Testament belong together. This
happened because each party took one side of the New Testament pas-
sages as the important one, under which the other had to be subordi-
nated.

Much light is thrown on the whole matter by an examination of the

question of how the office of the ministry is bestowed. There is an 7m-
mediate call. Here God calls directly without human intermediary. So
it was with the apostles, prophets, and teachers. (We are not here taking
into account those who were given gifts of healing and other such char-
ismata.) Only Christ can make a man an apostle. When a man was called
to replace Judas, He did it through the casting of lots. God has reserved
for Himself the right of calling a person to be a prophet. Neither in the
Old Testament nor in the New does a man cooperate in his being called
to be a prophet. So also a teacher was regarded in the early church as
being called in this way. To him was given the particular gift of ex-
pounding Scripture, which was then the Old Testament. The offices of
those who were thus directly called by God belonged to the whole church.
Those to whom these offices were given could exercise the functions of
their office anywhere. The church, the congregation, had only to rec-
ognize them as having been given the gifts of their office—or to recognize
them as false apostles, false prophets, or false teachers. This was a

79
difficult task, which could be accomplished only through the gift of dis-
cerning the spirits.
There is also the mediated call for the offices of a particular con-
gregation. These offices also are bestowed by the Lord Christ, but He
does it through men. Such were the bishops and deacons, who were
already there in the Pauline congregations (Phil. 1:1). They were chosen
by the congregation. Similarly the presbyters, where this institution of
the synagogue was maintained. It was determined by the decision of
the congregation who should belong to this body of “honored ones” who
sat in the first seats, the places of honor in the divine service (Matt.
23:6). Clearly there were some congregations where the arrangement
was episcopal-diaconal, and others where the arrangement was pres-
byterial (Acts 20:17 ff.). This diversity was not something Paul thought
important to set aside. Not until the Pastoral Epistles do we see them
growing together into a unity. We are also not told in the New Testament
who it was that elected these congregational officers. Was it the whole
congregation or was it done by the “honored ones,” a part of the con-
gregation, as was the case in Rome at the time of the First Epistle of
Clement—although the whole congregation was certainly involved in
giving its approval.
Nothing is more misleading than to read the notions and rules of
modern political or social theory into the ways things were ordered in
the New Testament. The church (ekklésia) is not a democracy in our
sense of the term. It is not a collection of individuals, each of whom may
claim the same rights. But one also dare not picture it as aristocratic.
It is a body whose members are joined together in different ways and
with different rights and functions. Even the body of presbyters, which
was itself a unity, had different grades within it, for outstanding among
them were those “who rule well. . . especially those who labor in preach-
ing and teaching” (1 Tim. 5:17), that is, those who were also bishops.
Also the laity (the Christian people) were an order, below which there
were the order of the catechumens and still lower orders (Sténde).
A person was usually placed in the orders and offices of the con-
gregation by the laying on of hands with prayer. This laying on of hands
could be done by a single person, as the apostle Paul did (2 Tim. 1:6).
Or it could be done by the presbytery (1 Tim. 4:14), or by both, as was
apparently the case with Timothy, or by a whole congregation through
their representatives (Acts 13:8).
It is important to observe that the idea of a succession of the laying
on of hands did not yet exist in the second century. The oldest succession

80
list we have is that of the church in Rome, recorded by Irenaeus. But
this is not a list of successive consecrations but a list of those who
occupied the office of bishop, with no attention paid to who laid hands
on each one. Here also, certainly in the early days, there was consid-
erable diversity. None of the Catholic theories regarding ordination and
consecration can claim any other support from the New Testament than
that with the laying on of hands and the accompanying prayer in the
name of Jesus a charisma for the office is bestowed.
It should be noted that the laying on of hands, which played a large
role in the church at the time of the apostles (Heb. 6:2) and was not
confined to the bestowal of an office, does not belong to the essence of
ordination (cf. John 20:21 ff.); that is to say, it does not have a special
mandate of Christ. It is rather a usage taken over from the Old Tes-
tament, such as we find in Moses’ ordination of Joshua (Num. 27:18;
Deut. 34:9), and used to place into office those who were to serve the
church. It is neither a sacrament, nor merely a gesture. It accompanies,
and expresses the prayer, which is promised to be heard, that the Holy
Spirit be present and graciously bestow His gifts. God is the One who
does this, the Lord Christ, the Holy Spirit. He does this through men,
whether through one, through a collegium, or through the whole con-
gregation (Acts 20:28). This is His usual way, though He may also give
such gifts directly, and with them an office.
In the light of the foregoing we may then recognize, as our Lutheran
fathers did quite clearly, the impossibility of making an essential dif-
ference between call and ordination or even making this difference div-
isive of church fellowship. It is God who calls into His ministry, usually
through men. The how is not the decisive thing. Whether He does it
through one person, through a collegium, or through a congregation
assembled in divine service, it all happens in the name of the church,
the whole church, which is the body of Christ, and so it happens in the
power of the Holy Spirit.

8
When one has come to recognize this, then the differences between
the theological theories of the 19th century become small indeed. Then
one begins to understand the glorious freedom of the Lutheran Church,
which knows no law about how ministers must be placed into office (de
constituendis ministris), because Jesus Christ did not give such a law,
either directly or indirectly. When the holy ministry is received and

81
instituted as given by the Lord, not over the congregation but im the
congregation, then it becomes very large and can be received and re-
joiced in as the great gift it is. Then the question how it is bestowed
gives place to what is bestowed. The more or less dubious theories of
its apostolic origin give place to its apostolic content. This is nothing
other than what was committed to the apostles, that they should be
proclaimers of the pure Gospel and servants of the sacraments instituted
by Christ—this and nothing more. Herein is the apostolicity of the office
of the holy ministry.
Only from this deep understanding can the spiritual office be re-
vitalized. How unimportant then becomes all that has grown onto this
office through the modern overorganization of the church; one has only
to think of the church politics with which modern bishops kill their own
time and that of others. Each sermon then becomes more important
than all those sessions which spend their time discussing big church
resolutions regarding the Bonn constitution, the atom bomb, or Goethe’s
200th birthday.
Conversely: The more seriously we take the holy ministry, the more’
seriously we take the Christian congregation. If we did this, we would
be freed from the aberration, from which our territorial churches (Lan-
deskirchen) suffer so deeply, that one can draw a line around an area
on the map of a city (a police district) and suppose that within that line
is what the New Testament calls a congregation, and that some modern
methods of caring for souls are all that is necessary to bring it to life.
To think that by reporting oneself to the police station in that area as
a resident one becomes a member of a Christian congregation is a notion
that cannot be fitted into any Christian understanding of the church!
Taking the ministry and the congregation seriously would put an end
to the misunderstanding that the church taxes which the government
extracts more or less painlessly are the offerings from which the church
of Christ lives. It would also mean the end of the notion that what the
Confessions say of church government is fulfilled by having a clever—
alas, all too clever—central church bureaucracy running things not by
the Word but by force (non verbo, sed vi).
All of this must pass away and will pass away, just as church gov-
ernment by princes as summi episcopi disappeared overnight. But the
holy ministry, preaching repentance and forgiveness, and the congre-
gation of the faithful, who in faith are justified sinners—that will remain.
The future may involve forms which we today do not know about, but
which the Lord of the church is preparing amid the thousandfold suf-

82
fering of contemporary Christianity. He is His body’s Savior even when
we see only dissolution. Still true are Luther’s great words about God’s
way in history: “By putting to death He makes alive” (occidendo vivi-
ficat).
This faith in what God is doing does not exclude our responsibility,
but rather includes it. This means renouncing everything that is de-
structive of the genuine holy ministry instituted by Christ and the gen-
uine congregation instituted by Him, everything that makes of what
Christ has instituted a place for exercising our lust for power, whether
clerical or congregational. The office of the holy ministry is not lord over
the congregation (2 Cor. 1:24); the congregation is not lord over the
office of the holy ministry (Gal. 1). Both are under Him who alone is
Lord; in Him they are one.
These are just a few thoughts about church and ministry which may
help you read with new awareness what God’s Word has to say on this
subject.

83
 APOSTOLIC
SUCCESSION
Letters to Lutheran Pastors, No. 41
April 1956

1
Apostolic succession is an ancient concept, and yet the particular im-
plication with which it is used nowadays is, as far as I can see, a quite
recent product among Christians. In 1833 appeared the first of the
“Tracts for the Times,” calling for a renewal of catholic thinking in the
Church of England. It was a powerful summons to the Anglican clergy
to ponder the responsibilities of their office. The author reminded his
brother clergy that the Anglican ordination liturgy contains “the doc-
trine of the Apostolic Succession.” He was the same John Henry New-
man who 12 years later gave up this view and converted to the Roman
Church.
His appeal had to be to the liturgy, since none of the confessions
of the ancient church, or the Thirty-Nine Articles, contain such a doc-
trine. Noteworthy is also the fact that the Roman Church has no par-
ticular doctrinal article concerning the successio apostolica. There
appears to be only one doctrinal document in which the expression is
used, and that, significantly, in what the Holy Office wrote to the Cath-
olic bishops of England in 1864 (apostolicae successionis praerogativa,
Denzinger, 1,686).
In the Roman textbooks of dogmatics the matter itself is dealt with
in the doctrine of the apostolicity of the church and in the doctrine of
priestly ordination. Trent speaks of it, rather in passing, in the doctrine
of the priesthood, when it says the bishops succeeded to the place of
the apostles (7n apostolorum locum successerunt, Session 238, ch. 4). In
the following canons, in which the doctrines of the Reformation are
rejected, there is no mention of any succession at all.
There are two places in the Interim of 1548 which approach the
way in which the term is used nowadays. The Interim is not a doctrinal

84
statement, and yet it does give a good indication of the thinking of the
Catholic reform theologians at that time. Catholicity is said to be a “sign
of the true church, that is, that it is universal, poured out through all
places and times through the apostles and those who followed them right
up to us and in continuing succession to the end of the world.” Similarly
the article concerning the sacrament of ordination speaks of the succes-
sion of the church: “When the bishops lay on hands and ordain to these
offices, they are acting in this always continual transmission and succes-
sion of the church.” [Melhausen, pp. 66, 94].
What nowadays is called apostolic succession is regarded in the
Catholic churches as so self-evident that there is scarcely need to talk
about it. It is quite simply given with the sacrament of priestly ordi-
nation. When the Church of England and its daughter churches (recently
also certain Lutheran churches, and union churches such as that of South
India) make so much of their apostolic succession, one is prompted to
ponder the fact that we are most apt to speak of those virtues which
we do not possess. It is hardly by chance that this overemphasis on
apostolic succession emerged in a church which indeed claims to be
catholic and to possess the three offices of bishop, priest, and deacon,
and yet is unable to say what these offices actually are.
We would have no need of engaging the Anglicans and their un-
clarity (the product of the sorry history of their Reformation), if they
were not continually beating on the doors of all other churches, de-
manding from Rome the recognition of their orders and from Protestants
the receiving of their “apostolic succession.” Prussia repeatedly looked
with longing eyes at the Church of England, from the first king, mightily
impressed by “no bishop, no king,” to romantic Frederick William IV
[1840—61] and his failed attempt to found a Jerusalem bishopric under
the auspices of Prussia and England. The plans for this bishopric were
what finally drove Newman to Rome. They contained the thought that
the Church of England would help those churches “less fully organized.”
In our lifetime we have seen a renewal of this friendly offer. It was
made—to the dismay of all serious English theologians—by certain Eng-
lish bishops as Hitler’s millennium was breaking upon us. In all seri-
ousness they said to us that our struggle against Ludwig Miller and
the other “German Christian” bishops was hopeless. The thing to do
was for the German “bishops” to have themselves consecrated from
England. That would bring everything into proper order. We were in-
vited to consider the example of certain Nordic churches which enjoyed
a good standing with the Church of England.

85
 We will speak later about the fateful consequences for Lutheranism
throughout the world which resulted when the churches of Sweden and
Finland entered upon joint consecrations with the Anglicans. They
should have said not only that such consecrations by the Church of
England are null and void in the eyes of Rome, but that the notion that
something more is given by them than is given to the ministry of Word
and sacrament also runs counter to the Lutheran Reformation, according
to the understanding of Article V of the Augsburg Confession.
The baleful consequences are plain for all to see in the mission fields
of Africa and India. There we are now blessed with two groups of Lu-
theran missionaries. The one has “apostolic succession,” the other does
not. Both are more or less in church fellowship with a whole range of
churches, but no longer with one another and no longer with whatever
Lutheran Church faithful to the Confessions is still left in the world.
To what an extent this matter has become a problem in Germany
can be seen by the shocking case of Friedrich Heiler, a professor of
theology in the Evangelical faculty of Marburg. He had himself secretly
consecrated bishop. Secretly he bestowed priestly ordination on Evan-
gelical pastors so that they now secretly (their congregations were not
informed) would be able to effect the “change” in the celebration of the
Sacrament of the Altar. Were there ever before in Christ’s church sac-
raments and ordinations at which what was given and what was received
was not clearly stated, but kept secret, not done in the presence of the
Christian congregation? The church governments in Germany would do
well to keep a watchful eye on such surreptitious Romanizing, as well
as on the open Calvinizing of the Lutheran heritage. Instead they make
special laws and take measures against those who are again taking se-
riously the old heritage of genuine Lutheran catholicity, the only weapon
against Romanizing.

2
In any attempt to understand all the talk nowadays about apostolic
succession, we must begin with the fact that apostolicity is integral to
the church. Therefore any church, any collection of people that claims
to be church, claims apostolicity in its own way. Roman Catholic theo-
logians are in the habit of dividing between apostolicity of origin, ap-
ostolicity of doctrine, and apostolicity of succession (apostolicitas
originis, doctrinae, successionis). Every church claims the first two.
Every church finally traces its origin back to the apostles and so to Jesus
Christ Himself.

86
 So it is nonsense to say that the Lutheran Church and the other
Protestant churches came into being in the 16th century or even later,
while the Roman Church goes back to Jesus and the apostles. The East-
ern Church is evidence and protest enough against such an idea. Where
was the papal church before there was a papacy? Whether any church
has its origin in the church of the New Testament or not is simply a
matter of faith. The Baptists and the Disciples of Christ make the claim
that their church was the church at the time of the New Testament.
Our Lutheran fathers never had the idea that they were founding a new
church. They were of the conviction that Christ’s one church was being
renewed with the pure apostolic doctrine in contrast with Rome, which
had fallen away from the Gospel.
These are matters of faith, and one should not try to settle them
by appeals to historical proofs. How this goes may be seen in the polemics
between the Anglicans and the English Roman Catholics. Both attempt
to prove that they are the legitimate continuation of the medieval church
in England. We Lutherans have no part to play in that sort of dispute,
although it has often been suggested that we should.
To provide the proof for the identity of any historical construction
is always enormously problematical. One may, for example, speak of an
English nation and of a German nation that continue through the cen-
turies. But if one looks more closely, one notices how great are also the
differences. In what sense are the English people of Henry VIII’s time
identical with the 10 times as many English people of today? In what
sense are today’s German people identical with the people of Luther’s
time? Was it anything more than a fiction when it was thought that the
Holy Roman Empire of Byzantium was living on in the empire of Char-
lemagne and the German empire of Otto the Great until it expired in
1806? Is there more of an identity between the Roman Church of today
and the church of Peter’s day than there is between the Roman Empire
of the first century and the Holy Roman Empire around 1800? It has
been observed that the difference between the church before Constan-
tine and the church after Constantine is greater than the difference in
the Western Church before and after the Reformation. Here the his-
torical proofs of identity simply fail.
The apostolicity of origin, the claim that the church to which I belong
is identical with the church of the apostles, is a matter of faith. The
answer has to do with whether I consider the doctrine of my church to
be apostolic. The claim of the Lutheran Church to be apostolic stands
or falls with the claim that it has faithfully preserved the doctrine of

87
the New Testament. For Lutherans certainly everything depends on
the question: “Where today is the doctrine of the apostles?”
Naturally, every church claims to be apostolic also in the sense of
the apostolicity of its doctrine. Now it is especially worth noting the
enormous difficulties the Roman Church has gotten itself into through
its development, especially since the Reformation. At the beginning of
his work Luther could still—within the Roman Church—appeal to sola
scriptura. Beside it there had long been the view of those who regarded
tradition as an expansion of Scripture. How old and widespread this
was we may observe in the Eastern Church, but it had never been made
into dogma. It was first at Trent that tradition was set beside Scripture
as a second equivalent source of revelation.
When this happens, when, to speak with the Smalcald Articles (II,
II, 15), Scripture no longer alone sets up articles of faith, then Enthu-
siasm has forced an entry into the church. It pushes beyond the doctrine
of the New Testament, destroys it, and abolishes the church’s apostol-
icity. It is one of Luther’s profoundest recognitions, also expressed in
the Smaleald Articles (III, VIID, that Enthusiasm is engendered by
scorn of the external Word, the words of Scripture read and preached.
Enthusiasm leads to the religion of the natural man, fallen man who
puts himself in God’s place. Luther saw that this is the great heresy
which the Enthusiasts, the pope, and Mohammed—the three forms of
the Antichrist known to him—had in common.
All three cited the much-misunderstood words of our Lord in John
16:12-13: “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear
them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all
the truth.” These words find welcoming ears with the pope, the arch-
bishop of Canterbury, the Quakers, the liberals, and all sorts of heretics.
Not so much, however, the words which follow, the rule by which one
can recognize whether it really was the Holy Spirit whom one has heard
or whether it was only the spirit of man or a still worse spirit: “He will
glorify Me, for He will take what is Mine and declare it to you” (v. 14),
that is, interpret the Gospel of Christ ever more deeply and thus glorify
Jesus.
How far things can go when this is not heeded we may see in the
history of the Roman Church—Christianity’s greatest tragedy. At first
tradition is like a tethered balloon, more or less held by the apostolic
witness. But with the declaration of two equivalent sources of revela-
tion—Scripture and tradition—the rope is cut and the balloon sails with
the wind, no one knows where. The answer came in the course of time.

88
By the 19th century it was so clear that the best Catholics were filled
with anxiety. Neither in Scripture nor in the tradition of the first cen-
turies can the grounds be found for any of the modern dogmas, from
the Immaculate Conception of 1854 through the 1870 Vatican Council’s
papal dogma to the Assumption of Mary [1950]. None of these were
known to the early church.
The doctrine of the Roman Church is no longer apostolic. Even in
1854 and 1870 it was still possible to claim to be reaching back to rel-
atively old traditions, or to what were regarded as such. Passages of
Scripture could be interpreted so as to be persuasive for faithful Cath-
olics. With the dogma of 1950 this is at an end. The Assumption of Mary
is a late legend, and only “conclusion theology” can produce Mary as
mediatrix of all graces and coredemptrix.
At work here has been the “theory of development.” This was pro-
posed by J. H. Newman and has been avidly put to use. By the way,
one can find it already in Mohler. This theory, which is supposed to
justify the modern dogmas, is the product of Romanticism and of the
19th century as a whole (the obvious parallels are Darwin and Marx).
The picture is that of a seed. At the beginning of the church all its
doctrines were contained within the seed, and these then unfolded from
century to century. Was not this the case with the doctrines of the Holy
Trinity and the Person of the God-man?
To be sure, the understanding of these doctrines progressed
through generations. They were, however, already there from the be-
ginning in the apostolic witness. The New Testament declares that Jesus
Christ is not a creature but the eternal Logos. The New Testament
declares that Jesus Christ, true God and true man, is one Person. What
unfolds in the church is the ever deeper understanding of the apostolic
words. But nothing can unfold if it is not there in the apostolic words.
In Roman Catholic theology today we find such questions dealt with
as, “Did Mary ever die?” Questions do arise which call for answers, such
as, “What is the essence and the extent of papal infallibility?” Since
Bernadette has been canonized and solemnly exalted “to the honor of
the altars,” can any good Catholic have doubt about the genuineness of
the appearances at Lourdes? If we further probe the question of the
authority of the papal teaching office, do we not reach the point where,
in addition to Scripture and tradition, there appears a third source of
doctrine, namely Christ’s regent on earth?
We can only rejoice in all that is done in the Roman Church in honor
of Scripture. In all doctrinal explanations attention is given to Scripture

89
and tradition. Many a Protestant church could find much to learn here.
But what are we to make of private revelations when they are claimed
not by some unknown person but by the pope himself? If he experienced
the miraculous sun of Fatima also in Rome, or had a vision of Christ,
why does he not keep this to himself, which would be the proper way?
Why is it proclaimed through the media to the city and to the world?
Why does the believing Catholic accept the pope’s every word in ques-
tions of faith and morals? Because he has tested it against Scripture
and tradition? Certainly not, but because the pope has said it!
“The pope’s word is God’s word.” This could be read during the war
on the doors of the cathedral in Salzburg in a Lenten letter of the arch-
bishop. Now Christians all know that human words can at the same
time be God’s words. “Do you believe that the forgiveness I declare is
the forgiveness of God?” At Confession this question is put [Small Cat-
echism V, 27]. But only the Word of God, the Word of the Gospel, the
Word of the living proclamation of the apostolic message today—only
this can be God’s Word.
Into what airy heights does the balloon of supposed tradition float
off when the line with Scripture is severed! When sola scriptura is left
behind, left behind also are God’s revelation and its authority. One can
only think with horror of the fearful fate the Roman Church is readying
for itself. After all, it is still Christianity’s largest and most influential
church. Is it still the church in which our fathers lived during the Middle
Ages? Is it still an apostolic church? Has it not lost the apostolicity of
doctrine? Not as though the apostolic witness had died out within it.
That is still there. Otherwise Rome would be no church. Also in the
Roman Church there are people who still believe in the Savior Jesus
Christ as the only Mediator between God and men. Also in this church
Christ is still present in the means of grace, to the extent that these
are still there. Also in this church people are born again to eternal life.
But there is also in this church that horror which Luther saw, the anti-
Christian exaltation of man, whether in the cult of Mary or in the re-
vering of the pope.
If we recognize this, we can do so only in the spirit of penitent self-
examination. Perhaps the same disease, Christianity’s mortal illness,
lurks also in us and our church, ever ready to break out. How is it said
by Luther at that place in the Smaleald Articles?
In short, enthusiasm clings to Adam and his descendants from the
beginning to the end of the world. It is a poison implanted and inoc-
ulated in man by the old dragon, and it is the source, strength, and

90
 power of all heresy, including that of the papacy and Mohammedariism.
Accordingly, we should and must constantly maintain that God will
not deal with us except through his external Word and sacrament.
Whatever is attributed to the Spirit apart from such Word and sac-
rament is of the devil (III, VIII, 9-10).

This is an earnest warning to every church. We cannot be discov-

ering this heresy in other churches without earnestly asking also of
ourselves, “Is it I, Lord?”

3
The doctrinal locus concerning the apostolic church has, beside the
apostolicity of origin and the apostolicity of doctrine, also the apostolicity
of succession. This is what looms most largely in Christian affairs now-
adays. We must first ask what it actually is, this apostolic succession,
which the Anglican churches esteem themselves as having, which the
Church of Sweden believes it possesses, and which the Eastern churches
and the Roman Church regard as their own possession.
In his famous Symbolism [English translation 1906] Mohler at-
tempted to clarify the meaning of tradition for modern Catholicism. He
found himself in remarkable agreement with Newman and his friends
in England as well as with Russian thinkers such as Chomjakov. Méh-
ler’s view of tradition has been traced to contemporary philosophy and
Romanticism’s understanding of society as an organism. Thus J. Ranft,
the dogmatician from Wiirzburg, in his learned work Der Ursprung des
katholischen Traditionsprinzips (1931). Other Roman Catholic scholars
agreed. (Cf. the collection in honor of the 100th anniversary of Mohler’s
death, Die Eine Kirche, ed. H. Tiichle, 1938.)
Mohler finds the law of tradition, which binds together the different
generations of a people or of a religious society, in the life of all such
societies.
The Divine Founder of our Church, when he constituted the com-
munity of believers as his permanent organ, had recourse to no other
law than that which prevails in every department of human life. Each
nation is endowed with a peculiar character, stamped on the deepest,
most hidden parts of its being, which distinguishes it from all other
nations and manifests its peculiarity in public and domestic life, in art
and science, in short, in every relation. It is, as it were, the tutelary
genius; the guiding spirit transmitted from its progenitors; the vivi-
fying breath of the whole community (Symbolism, pp. 279 f.).

91
 Just as there is a national spirit for peoples which sustains a people
in its peculiar wholeness through the generations, so there is also such
a spirit in religious communities. As examples of this we are given not
only the Chinese, the Parsees, the Moslems, and Hellenic heathenism,
but even Lutheranism:
Lastly, let us contemplate the religious sect founded by Luther him-
self. The developed doctrines of his Church, consigned as they are in
the symbolical books, retain, on the whole, so much of this spirit, that
on the first view, they must be recognized by the observer as genuine
productions of Luther (echt lutherisch). With a sure vital instinct (Le-
bensgefiihle), the opinions of the Majorists, the Synergists and others
were rejected as deadly; and, indeed (from Luther’s point of view,
Geist), as untrue, by that community whose soul, whose living prin-
ciple he was; and the Church, which the Reformer of Wittenberg
established, proved herself the unerring interpretess of his word (pp.
280 f.).

What revealing sentences these are! Plain for all to see is the utter
distortion of Lutheranism, and so a lot of words are not called for to
show that the Lutheran Church is not a religious association founded
by Luther, having as its principle the spirit of Luther. What is most
significant is that this way of speaking about a church is not put right
even if we cross out “Luther” and substitute “Christ”; instead of what
was allegedly established by the Reformer of Wittenberg, the church
established by Christ; instead of the Lutheran Church as “unerring
interpretess” of the words of Luther, the Roman Catholic Church as
“unerring interpretess” of the words of Christ. In the tradition of doc-
trine and the succession of teachers there is said to be an inherent spirit
at work infallibly revealing things. We hardly needed the specific ref-
erences to the Chinese, Greeks, Parsees, and Moslems to recognize that
such an idea is no product of the Christian faith and the witness of the
apostles. Such an idea did indisputably exist throughout the ancient
world, Hellenic and Asiatic, and it has certainly not died out. But what
has to be decisively disputed is that the idea is a Biblical and Christian
one, although there are indeed traces here and there of its influence on
the language used in the Bible, and we may observe how later it infil-
trated Christ’s church and helped form the idea of the “catholic” church.
The Holy Spirit, who creates unity of faith and confession, is not
the collective spirit of the Christian religious association. The church as
the people of God is something completely other than the people of Mani
or Mohammed. The church as the body of Christ is not an organism such

92
as a secular association, a family, a nation, or any other kind of “body.”
Méhler’s misunderstanding, and that of the whole Romantic movement,
cannot be excused by pointing to the ancient church’s use of terms from
ancient sociology of religion in speaking of the church of Christ. One
must never forget that the church fathers came out of ancient heath-
enism and continued to carry some of its concepts around with them for
a long time, for instance in their apologetics. The vital distinction to be
made is between what is truly Biblical and what was brought into the
church from that ancient heathen world. Clearly the catholicity and
apostolicity of the church are taught in Holy Scripture. The same cannot
be said of the way catholicity and apostolicity were understood through
the centuries of the development of the Catholic Church.
We have only to look at the sentence Augustine penned to over-
throw the Donatists: “When the whole world passes judgment, that
judgment is sure” (Securus iudicat orbis terrarum). He refers to the
church everywhere; the Donatists were to be found only in Africa. This
is the sentence that began to shake Newman’s faith in the catholicity
of the Church of England. Ever and again it has deeply impressed Cath-
olic and high-church circles. It does not come, however, from Scripture
but from the religious thought of the non-Christian world, perhaps from
very early forms of religion which are still alive within us or could become
so. “The voice of the people is the voice of God” (Vox populi vox Det.
[Cf. Seneca the Elder, Controversia, 1, 1, 10; Homer, Odyssey, 3, 214
f.]). This is Stoic philosophy, and at the same time a piece of ancient
wisdom—or foolishness. “My community will never agree in error”
[Haddith. Muctamad, 458—76. Cf. Lammens, Islam (1968), p. 93]. Thus
from Mohammed the doctrine of 1jma‘, the consensus of all Moslems.
Mohler is quite right in observing that here we are dealing with
doctrines which appear also outside the church. What he failed to ob-
serve is that they do not come from Holy Scripture, and indeed cannot
be brought into agreement with Scripture.
How useless, indeed impossible, it is to understand the doctrine of
the church from such principles is shown by the impossibility of putting
into practice the well-known dictum of Vincent of Lerins. According to
this dictum, that doctrine is to be regarded as catholic, and thus ortho-
dox, “which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all” [quod
ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est). Of the geograph-
ical catholicity of “everywhere” we have already spoken. It is difficult
to say anything better regarding the temporal catholicity of “always,”
or what is often called apostolicity. Here, however, we come upon the

93
heart of the doctrine of “apostolic succession.” What is this heart? It is
the conviction of all the great schools of wisdom and established religions
of Asia and the Hellenistic world that in the beginning there was truth
and that it was handed down in purity from generation to generation,
from father to son, from master to disciples, as from hand to hand,
without anything being added or taken away. The quasi per manus
tradita [“as though passed on by hand”] which appears in the fourth
session of Trent (Denzinger 783) is an age-old technical term for this.
Now how much of this can be found in Holy Scripture? In 1 Cor.
11:23 and 15:3 Paul uses the technical terms for the receiving and passing
on of a tradition (parelabon, paredoka). (We may note in passing that
this has no adverse effect on the independence of his apostleship, which
he so strongly emphasizes in Galatians.) In the New Testament we do
have tradition in the sense of the message of the Gospel, or some par-
ticular message, being faithfully kept and handed on (1 Tim. 6:20), with-
out addition or subtraction (Rev. 22:18-19). This “tradition,” however,
whether it be the oral proclamation of the apostles or whether it was
already written down, has nothing to do with a tradition which was later
placed in opposition to Scripture. The apostolic witness cannot be divided
into what was preached and what was written down. These are one and
the same. The authentic doctrinal tradition of the church in the sense
of the New Testament isnever anything else than the living transmission
of this witness in preaching and instruction. It can never be an inde-
pendent source of revelation. Authentic apostolic succession, then, is
always and only the succession of doctrine. It may be known by its
identity with the witness of the apostles in the New Testament. In this
way the content of what is proclaimed by any and every church is to be
weighed.
There is indeed also a succession of teachers who have faithfully
proclaimed the apostolic message. But who these surely are only God
knows, just as He alone “knows those who are His,” who are truly His
church [2 Tim. 2:19].To set down lists of such succession is an under-
standable desire. It is a human desire which in the ancient world pro-
duced lists of teachers, chains of transmitters of a tradition, in many
schools and religions. It was therefore a piece of ancient non-Christian
religion that penetrated into the church with the setting up of lists of
those who held office and were transmitters of tradition. People sought
in human books what is written only in the books of God.

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 4 ‘

The problem with these lists of succession may be illustrated by

two examples, touching the Old and the New Testament. How rabbinic
Judaism understood the handing down of what was taught in the Old
Testament is shown by the chain of tradition with which the Mishna
tractate Pirge Abot (“Sayings of the Fathers”) begins. “Moses received
the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders,
the elders to the prophets, and the prophets transmitted it to the men
of the Great Synagogue.” The line then continues through Simon the
Just (ca. 300 B.C. or a century later) to the rabbis of the later period.
We need not enter upon the question whether the Great Synagogue
ever actually existed or whether it was a fiction developed out of Neh-
emiah 8—10. It is enough to consider the inclusion of the prophets in
the list of those who transmitted the Torah to recognize the fiction. This
artificial construction was intended to show the transmission of divine
truth through the generations. The history of Old Testament revelation
is pressed into a scheme whose origin is not Biblical and which cannot
be brought into agreement with the Biblical record.
Our second example is the understanding of New Testament rev-
elation to be found in 1 Clement. There we read in chapter 42:
The apostles for our sake were given the Gospel as proclaimed to them
by the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus the Christ was sent from God. Christ,
therefore, is from God and the apostles from Christ. . . . When they
had received their instructions, having been filled with certainty by
the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ and strengthened by the
Word of God, they went out full of confidence in the Holy Spirit,
proclaiming the Gospel that the kingdom of God was about to come.
Through the country and the towns they preached, and appointed their
firstfruits, after testing them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons
of those who would believe. Nor was this any new thing, for a long
time ago there was mention of bishops and deacons in Scripture. For
there is somewhere in Scripture a passage which says, “I will appoint
their bishops in righteousness and their deacons in peace.”

Where is this written? Nowhere. The author probably had in mind

Is. 60:17, where the Septuagint (literally translated) has, “I will give
your rulers (archontas) in peace and your overseers (episkopous) in
righteousness.” Do we have here only a lapse of memory, or is it a
“spiritual” interpretation of the passage? In that case, though, it should
somehow be indicated. As the text stands in 1 Clement it is a spurious
quotation.

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 There is much to ponder in the fact that such a falsification or
whatever one may call it (perhaps our norms are not applicable to an
earlier time) occurs in the first document of the Roman Church, near
the end of the first century. The document sets up as a law that those
who bear churchly office are undeposable without evidence against them,
and this is imposed upon another church with the demand of obedience
[59:1] and the claim to be giving a decision given by the Holy Spirit
[63:2]. This was at a time when there was not yet a monarchic episcopate
in Rome, let alone a papacy. Clement was one of the bishops in Rome,
and we learn from the Shepherd of Hermas that he had the responsibility
of correspondence with congregations elsewhere [Vis. II, 4, 3]. What
he gives out as a binding decision has as its basis a falsification. Where
this all leads to we may see in its fruition in the Donation of Constantine
and the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals. We here observe the first instance
of that viewpoint which Cardinal Manning summed up in connection
with Vatican I and its undemonstrable and untrue historical assertions
about the place of the Roman bishops in the ancient church: “Dogma
must prevail over history” [Vatican Council (1969), pp. 125 ff.].
Quite apart from the problem of the spurious quotation, we have
to ask, “What is the meaning of the way history is pictured in Clement?”
We find a mixture of truth and fantasy. Revelation does indeed have a
chain of succession. The Father sends the Son, the Son the apostles.
The apostles hand their commission (Auftrag) on to those who bear office
(die Amtstrdger) in the church. That is Biblical. “As the Father has sent
Me, even so I send you” [John 20:21]. And the commission to proclaim
the Gospel to every creature, even to the ends of the earth and until
“the close of the age,” was in fact given the apostles by their Lord. And
of this we are told in Holy Scripture, that the apostles appointed office-
bearers, both to help them and to take their place. Thus Paul put Tim-
othy in office. According to Acts 14:23 Barnabas and Paul “appointed
elders” for the mission congregations in southern Asia Minor. This his-
torical fact was then dogmatically simplified in 1 Clement, as also by
such writers of the second century as Irenaeus and Tertullian, yes, by
the whole church of that time.
There is first the fact that it was not always the Twelve who founded
and organized the churches, yes, not even apostles in the real meaning
of the word. Indeed the greatest of the ancient churches, Antioch and
Rome, were founded by unknown Christians. It is simply historically
not the case that Peter and Paul were the founders of the church in
Rome, as Irenaeus claims at the beginning of his list of Roman bishops.

96
It is further simply not the case that the office of the ministry [das
geistliche Amt] always arose in the same way, namely by being received
from the apostles. The Didache (15:1) gives admonition to congregations
as to what to do in case there are no wandering apostles, prophets, or
teachers among them:
Elect therefore for yourselves bishops and deacons worthy of the
Lord, men mild and not greedy for money, truthful, men who have
been tested. They do the same service for you as the prophets and
teachers. Therefore do not think less of them, for they are the hon-
orable ones among you, along with the prophets and teachers.

What was always at first manifold is later brought into unified

forms. This may be observed from the beginning of the church’s history
(for instance in the liturgy), and it is the case also with polity. It is the
simplifying, dogmatical view which leads to such simplified constructions
of history as we saw in Judaism’s scheme of succession in the “Sayings
of the Fathers” and in its counterpart in what Clement of Rome did for
early Christianity.

5
It is well known how the great struggle against the Gnostic sects,
which the church had to carry on in the second century, brought toward
victory the idea of the apostolic succession of bishops and thereby cre-
ated the Catholic office of bishop. From the standpoint of the Refor-
mation we may regret that in this struggle the church was not content
to trust its defense to the Rule of Faith (the early form of the Apostles’
Creed) and to Holy Scripture. However, we must not forget that it was
not so easy to stand by sola scriptura at a time when the canon of the
New Testament was not yet in existence and when Holy Scripture was
the Old Testament. Our New Testament had not yet emerged from the
various writings which claimed to include the genuine apostolic witness.
We need to consider what it meant in the year 180 for the martyrs of
Scillium in North Africa that they were able to recognize the Pauline
Epistles only as worthy documents but not yet as Holy Scripture [Owen,
Some Authentic Acts of the Early Martyrs (1927), p. 72]. At that time
it was not possible to draw Scriptural proof from the Epistle to the
Romans. We must consider this situation of the church in order to un-
derstand what weight was then attached to the “apostolic” office of the
bishops as guardians of the pure doctrine.

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 To explore the problem of the oldest succession lists, we turn to
the work of Erich Caspar, the great historian of the papacy, whose
lifework remained unfinished. From the Schriften der Kénigsberger Ge-
lehrten Gesellschaft (1926) we have his Die dlteste Rémische Bischofsl-
iste. Although much has been said in criticism of details of this work,
its essential result remains, namely that the names Irenaeus gives in
the list of bishops (Adv. haer. III, 3, 3) are genuine.
As Hegesippus traveled among the churches of the East and the
West, he made lists of successions. He operated according to a dogmatic
viewpoint which had the false presupposition that one could prove the
transmission of the pure doctrine by the succession of the bishops, but
his researches have given us highly valuable historical material [Eu-
sebius, Historia ecclesiastica IV, 22, 1-3].
The Roman list which Irenaeus brings up to his time has nothing
but authentic names. Its age and authenticity are evidenced by the fact
that, in contrast with the current official list of popes, Peter does not
appear as the first Roman bishop. Peter and Paul are presented as the
founders of the church in Rome. They are said to have committed the
episcopate to Linus. The whole following list with its numbering of the
third, sixth, and ninth bishops is constructed on the presupposition that
Linus was the first bishop, and that Peter and Paul put him in this office.
In Rome in the third century Peter and Paul were still always named
together as of equal rank.
It is clear from 1 Clement, as also from Ignatius’ Epistle to the
Romans, that at the beginning of the second century in Rome there was
still no monarchic bishop, but rather a college of bishops. It would appear
that it was the incursion of the great Gnostic sects into Rome which
produced the need for a unified government of the church by one bishop.
Pius, the brother of the author of the Shepherd of Hermas, seems to
have been the first monarchic bishop in the chief city of the world.
Also here the rule proves true that things moved from East to West,
not only the Gospel but also church institutions. Already in the Reve-
lation to John we see that toward the end of the first century every
church in the East had its own bishop (“To the angel of the church in
. write... ”). What then were Linus, Anacletus, Clement, Evar-
istus, Alexander, Sixtus, [Telesphorus], and Hyginus, who appear in-
the list prior to Pius? They were, as Harnack already saw, obviously
outstanding members of the college of bishops, men who were renowned
as teachers of the church. The list, we must judge, indeed has nothing

98
but genuine names, and yet it is an artificial construction, similar to the
succession list in the Mishna tractate.
And what was the list intended to prove? Nothing except that in
Rome there was a tradition of doctrine, that the apostolic message was
faithfully handed on from generation to generation. The point of the list
is that there was a succession of teachers and therefore of doctrine.
Others could have been named, for all these “bishops” had colleagues
associated with them. These names may have been chosen because of
the reputation of these men, but a “succession” in a strictly historical
sense it was not. Without historical foundation are also the “years of
reign” with which they were later supplied. There is no solid evidence
for dates until the middle of the [second] century.

6
The greatest difference between the old Roman list of bishops and
other lists of bishops on the one hand and what is today understood by
“apostolic succession” on the other hand is the following. These lists,
such as the official Roman list of popes, and the list of the archbishops
of Canterbury or of Cologne, give the names of the incumbents of a
particular bishop’s seat, one after the other. They do not speak, and do
not intend to speak, of a succession of consecrations. The incumbent of
a bishop’s seat is not consecrated by his predecessor. Succession of office
must be strictly differentiated from succession of consecration. This
latter only gradually began to play a part in the church. Yet today this
is the idea of apostolic succession that is so insisted on: A bishop receives
his consecration from another bishop, whose consecration goes back to
other bishops, right back to the first bishops who were consecrated by
the apostles.
How historical is this succession? In later times it can certainly be
demonstrated or accepted with confidence, for after the year 200 the
old usage stood firm that a bishop was chosen by the clergy and people
of his church but that he could receive consecration only from one or
(very soon) several bishops. [A presbyter might consecrate a bishop
(Canons of Hippolytus II, 10).] It also became settled practice that only
a bishop could ordain presbyters and deacons [Council of Ancyra, Canon
13], as also that ordination was done with the laying on of hands. But
does this tell us that all consecrations go back to the apostles? Timothy
was ordained by Paul with the laying on of hands (2 Tim. 1:6). In 1 Tim.
3 and 5 he was given instruction for appointing bishops, deacons, and

Si)
widows (deaconesses), where the laying on of hands is explicitly men-
tioned. But were bishops everywhere ordained in this way? How were
things done in Rome in Clement’s day? We do not know.
The historian may regret a gap in our knowledge of what went on,
but for one who believes Scripture to be God’s Word there is a deeper
meaning in the fact that we nowhere have a mandate of our Lord to
carry out an ordination, let alone instructions as to how it should be
done. We have the mandate to baptize. We have the mandate to repeat
the Lord’s Supper, and there is the institution of the Office of the Keys.
This last, we do well to note, in threefold form: Matt. 16 to Peter, Matt.
18 to the assembled congregation, and John 20 to the Twelve (more
precisely the disciples who were gathered on the evening of Easter Day).
But no one has been able to show when Jesus ordained the Twelve. The
Catholic churches have to resort to the command to repeat the Lord’s
Supper. With the words “This do in remembrance of Me” Jesus is said
to have ordained the apostles to be priests.
It cannot be without significance that we hear of no laying on of
hands. Jesus laid His hands on children and on the sick, but not on the
Twelve. Where we might most expect it, when He gives them the Office
of the Keys, there at John 20:21 ff. we read: “Jesus said to them again,
‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent Me, even so I send you.’
And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and said to them,
‘Receive the Holy Spirit... .’ ” One almost gets the impression that
here, as whenever He sent out the apostles, Jesus intentionally avoided
the laying on of hands. Such an avoidance may have been due to the
fact that ordination by laying on of hands was rabbinical usage. That is
how a rabbi ordained his disciples. Pondering what Jesus said against
the scribes in Matt. 23 may suggest why Jesus did not follow their usage.
Does He not say that among those that are His the title “rabbi” is not
to be used, “for you have one Teacher (didaskalos), and you are all
brethren” (v. 8)?
This did not prevent the title “teacher” from being used in the
church for the great office of expounding Holy Scripture, at first the
Old Testament. This office, along with that of the apostles and prophets,
was foundational in the beginnings of the church, recognized not only
in a particular congregation but throughout the church. And, after all,
the title “teacher” was not directly prohibited by the words of our Lord,
(Cf. also “master” (kathégétés, v. 10.)
However that may have been, it was certainly bad that, under the
pressure of age-old Eastern custom, and against the express will of

100
Jesus, the church again took up the title “father” in place of “teacher”
and first of all addressed the bishop thus (pappas, papa, cf. abbas in
monasticism). (Cyprian of Carthage was still addressed thus; today the
title is restricted to the bishop of Rome and the patriarch of Alexandria.)
The suggestion that Jesus was acting in deliberate contrast and
opposition to the rabbis when He avoided the laying on of hands in what
we might call ordination is strengthened by the noteworthy fact that
the rabbis no longer followed the usage of the laying on of hands when
in the second century it had become a characteristic of Christian ordi-
nation. So the laying on of hands is an early usage in the church (Heb.
6:2), with an Old Testament background (Moses laid his hands on Joshua,
Deut. 34:9; cf. Num. 27:18), but it cannot be said to be something that
Christ commanded us to do, let alone be called a sacrament. It was a
way of bestowing a blessing, and that it certainly did.
It is also clearly not something that was reserved to the holder of
a particular office. Beside the laying on of hands done by the apostles
was also that done by the elders. Elders were men of special standing,
not incumbents of a specific office. Thus it was in the synagogue, in the
church of Jerusalem, in the Pauline congregations, and still so in Rome
at the time of Clement. Elders were elected by the congregation as
“honored ones,” as protokathedritaz (“having the first seats”), as they
are still called in the Shepherd of Hermas [Vis. III, 9, 7; ef. 1 Clement
1:3; 21:6]. Because of their age, because of what they had done for the
congregation, or for some other reason, they occupied the first places
in the divine service. They represented the congregation. From among
them the bishops were chosen, the group of officers who led the con-
gregation, in particular to perform the office of preaching the Word or
of saying the liturgical prayers, especially during the Eucharist. They
did what was otherwise reserved to the prophets. Elders who then also
performed such offices were to be “considered worthy of double honor,
especially those who labor in preaching and teaching.” What is said in
1 Tim. 5:17 matches perfectly what is said of the situation in Rome in
1 Clement. The elders as representatives of the congregation partici-
pated in the ordination of Timothy. They laid their hands on him (1 Tim.
4:14), as also did the apostle [2 Tim. 1:6].
How free was the usage of the laying on of hands in the early church
we may see from the noteworthy passage Acts 13: 1-3, where the church
ordains an apostle. Here in Antioch we find prophets and teachers of-
ficiating, among them Barnabas (from the sound of the words a prophet)
and Paul (the schooled scribe) as “teacher,” that is, as one who expounds

101
the Scriptures. During the liturgy the Holy Spirit by way of prophetic
statement (as in the case of Timothy) instructs them to send out Bar-
nabas and Paul on a special mission. “Then after fasting and praying
they laid their hands on them and sent them off” (v. 3). In the early
church there are more examples of a teacher becoming a missionary.
There was Pantaenus, who gave up the office of teacher in Alexandria
in order to go as a missionary to “India” [Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica
Ve 10421!
Who laid on hands here? The congregation, perhaps through its
elders. I have never been able to understand how learned Catholics,
such as Tixeront in his well-known work on ordination [Holy Orders
(1928), p. 142] can read Acts 13:3 in such a way that the laying on of
hands by the congregation could be taken as little more than a sort of
godspeed for a good journey. The problem here is that the later Roman
Catholic idea of ordination is being read back into a time when it had
not as yet developed, or to say the least, into a time when there was
greater diversity of forms in the life of the church. One has only to study
such forms as they have survived on the fringes of ancient Christianity,
in Ethiopia or in old Ireland, to see how at the beginning there was
always diversity, which under the influence of the great metropolitan
centers was reduced to unified forms.

7
What emerges from the foregoing? Here so much could only be
pointed to, and yet what help have we found for dealing with the problem
of the “apostolic succession” today? From a doctrinal point of view it
can only be seen as a soap bubble, on which no church can be built. The
Roman Church has the wisdom to put the whole matter in its doctrine
of the priesthood. Rome knows that apostolic succession, in the double
sense of a sequence of bishops and a succession of consecrations, has
never guaranteed what the ancient church wished to have guaranteed,
namely purity of doctrine, the apostolicity of the church. Rome also
knows how many bishops, consecrated with every proper rite, have
fallen away in persecutions or into heresy. The church in the East knows
this too.
Bishop Lilje, then, is crashing through open doors when he charges
that it is heresy to affirm that the apostolic succession guarantees pure
doctrine. Rome does not affirm this. For Rome the purity of the doctrine,
the apostolicity of the church, is guaranteed by the office of Christ’s

102
infallible vicar as successor of the “Prince of the Apostles.” The signif-
icance of the succession of consecrations/ordinations for Rome is simply
and only that which is expressed in the liturgy of ordination to the
priesthood: the power to offer the sacrifice of the Mass for the living
and the dead (potestas ordinis) and the power of the Office of the Keys
(potestas iurisdictionis). The silken thread upon which the Roman doc-
trine of office hangs is the notion that when our Lord said: “Do this in
remembrance of Me,” He wanted to ordain the apostles to be priests.
If these words are to be understood differently, namely in the sense
that the Twelve here as in other passages are the representatives of
God’s people as a whole, then the entire special priesthood simply col-
lapses. The New Testament knows that in the new covenant there is
only one high priest, Jesus Christ, and the priestly people of God, whose
members are kings and priests.
If the Reformers, indeed also the fathers of the Reformed churches,
including the Anglican, saw one thing clearly, it is that it is quite un-
tenable to hold this interpretation of our Lord’s bidding that His Supper
be repeated. In addition Matt. 18:18 makes it clear that the Keys are
not the sole prerogative of the clergy. Evidence of their belonging to
the whole church may be found in the early church and for a long time
thereafter. There is the lovely story related by Melanchthon in the
Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope (67 f.), ascribed to
Augustine and to be found also in Gratian’s Decretum, where it appears
as an illustration for a point of canon law. Two shipwrecked Christians
were together in a boat. One was a catechumen. Him the other baptized,
and then by him was absolved. The view of the Lutheran Confessions
that the keys have been given to the whole church is in harmony with
Scripture and the ancient church.
If one accepts the Roman view, then the apostolic succession makes
some sense: The power to make the sacrifice of the Mass and the power
to absolve is bestowed. If one does not accept this view, then there is
no apostolic succession. Leo XIII was then quite right in declaring An-
glican orders to be null and void, because their form, that is, the words
of ordination, was invalid and because the right intention was lacking.
The words of ordination of the Anglican ritual are indeed ambig-
uous. One must probably be an Anglican in order not to see that they
are therefore impossible.
Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a Priest in the Church
of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands.
Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou

103
 dost retain, they are retained. And be thou a faithful dispenser of the
Word of God, and of his holy sacraments.

These words can mean ordination to the Gospel office of proclaiming

the Word and administering the sacraments. “Priest” then means pres-
byter, in the general sense which was the usage for a long time in North
Germany and is still the usage in Scandinavia, where the parson is called
“priest.” This is the way the formula is understood by evangelically
minded Anglicans. Among the High Church and Anglo-Catholics, how-
ever, “priest” means sacerdos, one who offers sacrifice at the consecra-
tion in Holy Communion. As to right intention, what the ordaining
bishop may be thinking he is doing is left up to him. This is also the
case with what is meant by the formula for consecrating a bishop, whose
office is said to be “the office and work of a Bishop in the Church of
God.” What is essential to this office is not said.
This way of doing things is characteristic of Anglicanism. We may
look for its roots in the character of the English people, as well as in
the inexpressibly sad story of the English Reformation, which was at
first an event of national politics rather than a religious event. This is
not to deny all that has been and is great in this church; there is much
for us Lutherans to learn from it. Its “apostolic succession” we cannot,
however, acknowledge; it is an empty form.
For us there are different grounds than those of Rome for rejecting
Anglican “apostolic succession.” For us the matter is not decided by
whether the consecrating of Archbishop [Matthew] Parker [in 1559] was
adequately done: Two bishops with Roman Catholic consecration (but
without office), plus two Reformed bishops participated. This is also not
the direction of the Roman arguments against the validity of Anglican
orders. As we have seen, these attach to the faulty formula of ordination
and the lack of the intention to make the one ordained into a priest in
the Roman Catholic sense. Against these considerations the laying on
of hands, be it ever so canonical, is of no avail. When our Anglican
friends would make us in our “less fully organized churches” into suc-
cessors of the apostles by their laying on of hands, we will have to teach
them that the genuine succession of the apostles is that which lives by
the pure proclamation of the Gospel and celebration of the sacraments,
and not by the myth of an unbroken chain of consecrations going all the
way back to the apostles.

104
 8 rf
Not to see this clearly is for Lutherans a grievous failure. Of the
offered “apostolic succession,” we must ask what is its nature and what
are the consequences of accepting such an ecclesiastical myth. The
sooner the answers, the better. We may recall the answer given by
Archbishop Séderblom at the World Conference for Faith and Order at
Lausanne in 1927. Whatever else may be said of his limitations, it was
surely a piece of his Lutheran heritage which came to sober expression
when he said that the Church of Sweden has preserved the apostolic
succession together with other things inherited from the ancient church,
but that such a succession is according to Lutheran doctrine an adia-
phoron. This he did quite unforgettably. He threw aside the printed
text of what he had intended to say, for he felt compelled to speak even
more clearly. For that all Lutherans were grateful.
If one looks more closely at the Swedish succession, it is really much
better than the Anglican one. The critical link was a man who had just
been consecrated by the pope himself in Rome, or, as Luther might say,
the succession was received directly from the Roman Antichrist. But
just this circumstance shows what nonsense it is to regard succession
as more than time-honored custom and to consider it as theologically
necessary or important. As an old ecclesiastical form, as an adiaphoron,
it can be borne with that humor with which Séderblom carried his bish-
op’s staff. Once, during a visitation, he realized that he had forgotten
to pack it. It was quickly replaced by one cut from a birch tree. Is it
possible for a Swedish Lutheran seriously to suppose that a pope who
rejected the doctrine of the Lutheran Reformation as heresy could be
the one to guarantee that the Church of Sweden has indeed true bishops
and pastors?
Yet even there the old, healthy view of succession, the view in
harmony with the Lutheran Confessions, seems to be losing ground in
influential circles. In the official statement about itself in the handbook
of the Lutheran World Federation, The Lutheran Churches of the World,
ed. A. R. Wentz (1952), p. 171, we read that the Church of Sweden
accepted the Unaltered Augsburg Confession in 1593 and that since 1686
the Book of Concord is the church’s confession. Then on p. 174 we read:
“Sweden’s apostolic succession has opened the way for intereommunion
with the Church of England,” an intercommunion that has meanwhile
been raised by both parties to the level of church law.
About the consequences of all this for Lutheranism around the world
more than enough has already been said in these letters. We can only

105
ask why others did not raise their voices while there was still time.
Where was the voice of the bishops of Norway and of Denmark? Where
was the voice of the Lutheran churches of Germany and of America?
Where was the voice of the Lutheran missions? They looked on com-
placently when Lutheran bishops were consecrated with the assistance
of Anglican bishops and archbishops. They were silent when it was up
to them to raise their voices in warning; they owed this brotherly service
to the Lutheran churches of the world. The old Archbishop Johannson
of Finland was the first to see where this path would lead. His voice
died away unheard.
We all reassured ourselves at first with the fact that the“apostolic
succession” is an adiaphoron—and that it is, if it is understood in the
Lutheran manner as simply a form from the ancient church. But there
comes a time when an adiaphoron ceases to be an adiaphoron. This is
said with all necessary clarity in Article X of the Formula of Concord.
This article was a beacon and banner for us in the church struggle in
Germany, and we were privileged to experience that it is still aweapon
with which one can fight for the church of God. “In a case of confession
or scandal nothing is an adiaphoron.” Where the pure doctrine of the
Gospel is at stake, there toleration of adiaphora ceases. There it is the
duty of “the entire community of God . . . and especially the ministers
of the Word as the leaders of the community . . . to confess openly, not
only by words but also through their deeds and actions. . . ” (Formula
of Concord, Solid Declaration, X, 10).
We are not in a position to tell the Lutherans in Sweden who hold
to the old heritage of their church (it is a truly great heritage) what
they should do in order to preserve the pure Gospel of justification by
faith alone and the pure administration of the sacraments, to which pure
proclamation about the sacraments also belongs. We can pray for them.
What we cannot do is acknowledge the Church of Sweden as a church
of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession when it has altar fellowship with
Anglicans and has Anglican bishops, who reject “by faith alone,” par-
ticipate in the consecration of Swedish bishops. The same must be said
of other Lutheran churches when they put themselves into a similar
situation.
Here the Lutheran World Federation would have a great task, the
task of saying clearly what the Lutheran Confessions still mean for our.
day and wherein the true unity of the church resides. But can we expect
anything else from it than that it simply offers justification for what has
already been happening? Can we expect that it will commit suicide? It

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is at the outset committed to the principle that churches which are in
church fellowship with the Reformed and the Anglicans are to be rec-
ognized as churches of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession, in spite of
the latter’s Articles VII and X, not to speak of the Formula of Concord.
The witness of the Lutheran Confessions will then have to be heard
outside the Lutheran World Federation. May this happen only in hu-
mility and love! However conscious we may be of our poverty and weak-
ness, this is the great service that is ours to do for those who have lost
the confession of the Lutheran Reformation or are in danger of losing
it. It is the task of those whose ordination to the Lutheran ministry
gave them the authentic apostolic succession. This is no mysterious
something that rests on a myth of consecrations. Rather it consists in
the clear commission which our Lord gave to His whole church, to pro-
claim the pure apostolic doctrine and administer the sacraments ac-
cording to the Gospel.
That is the great responsibility which today is given to the Lutheran
pastor. It cannot be taken from him by any bishop, any church govern-
ment, or any ecumenical organization. We may and can confess, also if
those remain silent who are in the first instance called to do this. In
faithful confession lives the whole glory of our office, even when this
glory is hidden under the cross.

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 Last Things: Church and
Antichrist
Letters to Lutheran Pastors, No. 24
March 1952

1
A few years ago, in the time of Germany’s collapse, it was reported of
a German pastor that he boasted of preaching only on the Revelation
of St. John. Probably his poor congregation soon made it clear to him
that that would not do. Yet, in his way, he was attempting to make
good what had been neglected by the church and by us pastors: escha-
tological proclamation.
In our day the Biblical doctrine of the Last Things has come alive
for us as a gift given in the midst of what the church has had to endure.
At the beginning of this century a complacent church regarded the Last
Things as an element of the first Christian proclamation which more or
less belonged only to that first period, a form of the Gospel which was
for us of only historical interest. Or, alternatively, it was thought of as
something that might be of significance for the future, at the end of our
lives, or at the end of the world, something we needed to study only in
preparation for such an end. That there is for the church no more vitally
relevant doctrine than that of the Last Things was brought home to
Christians in Europe by all they were called upon to endure. It was not
quite the same for Christians in other parts of the world, although in
America some first indications can be observed of a new interest in
eschatology.
There was perhaps some dark foreshadowing of what was to come
when, at the beginning of the century, historical theology again discov-
ered the eschatological character of the Gospel—much to the discomfort-
of the “systematic” theologians and the representatives of practical the-
ology. No one can tell us, who have endured the judgments of God’s
wrath, that the fearful pictures of apocalyptic tribulation shown us in

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Holy Scripture are but the product of Eastern fantasy. We cari no longer
read these passages the way they were expounded in earlier centuries.
The old expositions seem like the work of a connoisseur who stands
before some old paintings as if he had all the time in the world, and
expounds what he finds so enchanting about them. He is quite at peace
with himself and his expert knowledge—or his expert ignorance. The
paintings mean absolutely nothing decisive for his existence.
For us these are realities of which we have had some experience.
We are like those people in the East for whom Mereshkovski speaks in
the introduction to The Brothers Karamazov (Munich, 1921).
They are like men who stand upon some height and looking over the
heads of those around them see what is coming upon them, what at
the moment is not yet seen by the multitude below. Thus have we,
beyond all the coming centuries and whatever could possibly happen,
caught a glimpse of the end of the world’s history. . . .We may indeed
be the weakest of the weak. Our “power is made perfect in weakness.”
Our strength is in this, that we cannot be won over by any seductions
of the most mighty of all devils, by any seductions of the everlasting
“normality” of unending “progress.” We cannot be bought by any
averaged philosophy that is neither hot nor cold. Our faith is set on
the end; we see the end; we long for the end. . . . In our eyes there
is an expression which never was before in the eyes of men. In our
hearts there is a feeling that has not been felt by men for 19 centuries,
not since the vision was seen by that lonely exile on the island that is
called Patmos: “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let him
who hears say, ‘Come.’ . . . He who testifies to these things says,
‘Surely I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”

It is by living the Last Things that we are given a new understand-

ing of the fact, and why it is so, that always involved in the Gospel and
the proclamation of the Gospel are the Last Things, the end, Christ’s
return. There is preaching of the Gospel in the world because we are
in the world’s evening (Matt. 24:14). The reddening dawn of the day-
break of the kingdom of God is signaled by the lame walking, the blind
seeing, that “lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear.” Finally the nearness
of the kingdom of God is signaled by the fact that “the poor have good
news preached to them” [Matt. 11:5]. All preaching is preaching of the
Last Things when it is preaching of the Gospel. And no preaching is
preaching of the Last Things if it is not preaching of the pure Gospel—
even if it were the exposition of nothing else but the Revelation of St.
John and the other eschatological texts of Holy Scripture. How can
anyone proclaim the Lord’s death without a thought of His coming again?

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How can the word “justification” come from our mouths without a
thought of His coming again to judge the living and the dead? How can
one say “Amen” at the end of the sermon without thinking of that great
Amen at the end of the Bible: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus”?

2
In the light of the foregoing we shall take up a single part of es-
chatology, a not unimportant part, the doctrine of the Antichrist. In
dogmatics it appears, because of its nature, in two places, in the doctrine
of the Last Things and in the doctrine of the church. Yet both belong
together, for the doctrine of the church, when seen clearly, that is, seen
in the light of God’s Word, is actually only a part of eschatology. There
is church only at the end of the world (1 Cor. 10:11). “In these last days,”
according to Heb. 1:2, “He [the Father] has spoken to us by a Son.” At
the end of the world the Son calls the faithful from among all nations
to the true people of God, the church. All that happens in the church is
fulfillment of the prophecies of the end, for example the whole activity
of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:16 ff.; Joel 2:28 ff.). The sacraments of Baptism
and the Lord’s Supper anticipate what happens at the end and in eternity
(Rom. 6:2 ff.; 1 Cor. 11:26; John 6:54). So also Holy Absolution and the
justification of the sinner anticipate what happens on the Day of Judg-
ment. Even the liturgy on Sunday is an anticipation of the liturgy of
heaven (Rev. 4), as every Sunday celebrated as “the Lord’s day” an-
ticipates the Parousia (cf. the expression “the day of the Lord,” Amos
5:18). Only from this vantage point is it possible to understand the church
of the New Testament and its hope anchored in the end.
The first Christians were not Adventists. Had they been, they
would not have survived the Parousia’s delay. In fact, the early Christian
“Adventists” did fall from the faith (2 Peter 3:3 ff.). Nor were the first
Christians Catholics, for whom institutionalization of the church be-
comes a substitute for the kingdom which has failed to come. Nor were
they like some modern Protestants, for whom the kingdom of God be-
comes a kingdom of this world in social ethics and religiosity. Rather
they lived in the great actuality of the Last Things, in the church of the
living God. They were not a religious association with certain escha-
tological convictions. They were the holy people of the end time, the
saints, who still lived in this world but no longer belonged to it. While
for modern Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, it might only
be a matter of pictures and parables, for them it was a reality they

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 é

actually lived when they designated themselves the people of God, the
body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit.
To the reality of the church, however, belongs the reality of the
Antichrist. “Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that
Antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come; therefore we
know that it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18). Because the church lives at
the end time of the world, therefore the prophecy of the coming An-
tichrist is being fulfilled. And because the prophecy of the Antichrist is
being fulfilled, the church knows that it is the last time. So the ap-
pearance of the Antichrist must run through the whole history of the
church. The Antichrist is always coming, and he is already here. Sim-
ilarly in Paul, who does not use the word “Antichrist,” “the man of
lawlessness . . . the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself
..” is coming, but in such a way that “the mystery of lawlessness is
already at work.” But it will only then be fully revealed when “in his
time” he comes “by the activity of Satan .. . with all power and with
pretended signs and wonders” (2 Thess. 2:3 ff.).
Both apostles agree that the Antichrist is on his way, insofar as his
appearance belongs to the end time. Both see him active in the present
and in the future. While Paul looks more to the future, John focuses
more on the present. This matches what they say elsewhere about es-
chatology. Their unity is not diminished by whether the emphasis is on
the present or on the future in an end time that embraces both the
present and the future. We must not bend Paul to John or John to Paul.
Rather we must recognize how in them both we have the one harmonious
doctrine of the Antichrist.
We may not use our notions of time to make measurements of the
last time as we are told of it in Scripture (2 Peter 3:3-9). There seems
to be a contradiction between the fact that the Lord is coming soon and
that 19 centuries have now passed since this was proclaimed. This we
simply accept, as we also do the fact that at the time of John it was
already “the last hour,” in which the Antichrist was in the world, and
that the time of his being revealed still lies ahead.
One cannot weaken this apparent contradiction by explaining it
away in terms of a development from the comparatively harmless an-
tichrists of the early time to the anti-Christianity which comes to con-
summation at the Parousia. First of all, Holy Scripture does not know
our concept of development; it was first read into Scripture by the ev-
olutionistic 19th century. Furthermore, what John tells of anti-Chris-
tianity is no less satanic, no less dangerous, than what Paul sees. Both

111
derive from the same source: the devil. Both have the same goal: to cast
Jesus Christ from His throne and to destroy His true church. Both fight
with the same weapons: the power of the lie, and deceptions which
seduce to falling away from the true God (1 John 2:22 ff.; 2 John 7; 2
Thess. 2:3, 9 ff.). The difference is only in the outward appearance. In
John the Antichrist appears in the shape of many men who are called
antichrists, in Paul in the shape of “the man of lawlessness.” What we
are told of is the same, whether in one form of appearance or the other.
The language in 2 Thess. 2:3 is clearly picturesque and apocalyptic.
That he “takes his seat in the temple of God” is apocalyptic picture
language ever since the desecration of the temple by Antiochus Epi-
phanes, as seen by Daniel. Similarly, that Christ “will slay him with the
breath of His mouth” belongs to the picture language of the Messianic
hope in the prophets (compare 2 Thess. 2:8 with Is. 11:4 and Rev. 19:15,
20).
Hence it must remain an open question whether the prophecy of
“the man of lawlessness” will be fulfilled in the form of one individual
man. Elert has a telling comment on the apocalyptic visions in the Bible:
“Not the pictures themselves but what is meant by them provides us
with what we believe” (Glauwbe [1956], p. 518). In this case the fulfillment
can also be in the form of a collective person. This is clearly what John
has in mind when he sees the Antichrist in many antichrists. The ful-
fillment could also be thought of in this way, that the collective person
will find his final expression in an individual person.
There are questions here which we cannot answer because Scripture
does not give an answer. Scripture tells us that the Antichrist belongs
to “the last hour” and is therefore there in some form at all times of the
church’s history. It is “the last time” ever since Christ, the Firstfruits,
rose from the dead and so began the resurrection of all the dead (1 Cor.
15:23). It was already a part of the end of the world when Jerusalem,
according to our Lord’s prophecy, was destroyed in the year 70.
Only an utterly unbiblical way of looking at history could suppose
that the Last Things belong altogether to the future, whether near or
distant. As surely as the church never ceases to pray, “Thy kingdom
come,” and “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus,” so surely it believes what the-
Lord says: “The hour is coming, and now is”(John 5:25), and also the
warning of His apostle: “Children, it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18).
Because this is so, the church knows that the Antichrist is in the world.

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 2 ¢

If it did not know about the mystery of the Antichrist, the church
would not be able to exist. It would not be able to arm itself against
him, to fight against him, to stand against him. When it is taught that
the devil does not exist, he has achieved the propagation of his most
dangerous triumph. Similarly there is no greater strengthening of the
Antichrist than the view that he is only an apocalyptic figure who will
later someday make his appearance—indeed a most sinister being, but
nevertheless a useful warning before the end.
If the Antichrist is not yet on the scene, then the readying alarm
has not yet been given. What an assurance of “All’s well” is given by
such thinking! This is true of the whole system of successive notifications
which has been read out of Scripture: conversion of the Jews, resur-
rection of the martyrs, and so on. Those who think this way don’t seem
to realize that thereby the signs of the end, for which our Lord com-
manded us to watch, have been turned into their direct opposite. One
may acknowledge that the Lord will come as a thief in the night, but
one also knows that it is not yet night, even though it may be evening,
and perhaps even late evening. The church will only be at the ready if
it knows that the Antichrist is already in the world, and that it is at
every moment exposed to the full force of his attacks. If it does not
know this, then it is hopelessly defenseless against him. That is the
meaning of the apostolic warnings.
What then is the mystery of the Antichrist? What does he want?
What does he do? What he wants is to seduce Christians to fall away
from the true God, the God revealed in Christ. In the place of the truth
of the Gospel he puts the lie, the way of falsehood. Here the passages
in John are in full agreement with 2 Thess. 2. And there is another point
of complete agreement. In contrast with the devil, the Antichrist is
religious. According to John he comes with a message which sounds
quite Christian. He affirms the Gospel, but he falsifies it. According to
1 John 4:3 this falsification is done by denial of the Incarnation.
John was clearly writing vis-a-vis emerging Gnosticism. This pow-
erful movement in the early days of Christianity was able to win over
great numbers of Christians, notably in Egypt and Syria. In the middle
of the second century the orthodox church, the church whose faith was
in the incarnate Christ, appears to have been a minority. Yet in its way
how pious was this honoring of Christ as a heavenly being that appeared
here on earth with only the semblance of a body! Against this John
wrote his gospel with its central theme: “The Word became flesh.”

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 The religious character of the Antichrist, as described by Paul, is
disclosed in the cult of man. This appears in the church, this religious
exaltation of man. The voice of the serpent at the beginning in Paradise
is heard again in the message of this Antichrist: “You will be as God.”
This is the oldest heresy in human history, and it appears in ever new
forms to the end of the world. This is clearly the sense of the prophecy
of the enemy who “exalts himself against every so-called god or object
of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming
himself to be God” (2 Thess. 2:4).
Whatever forms this divinization of man may take in the future—
and certainly such an error always gets worse—one would have to be
struck blind not to recognize the appearance of this original heresy ever
and again in Christian history. The natural man always has the incli-
nation to use religion for his self-glorification, also the Christian religion.
From ancient India we hear: “Atman is Brahman” (the soul is divine).
Every missionary to India knows that the greatest hindrance to the
Gospel is this divinization of man. This same divinization of man is to
be found also in the idealism of the Greeks and of the Germans of the
classical period, and it permeates the theology of the Greek fathers, of
medieval scholasticism, and of modern Protestantism.
This is what the Antichrist wants. This is what he does. He leads -
men away from the worship of the one true God, the God who in Jesus
Christ became flesh. He leads them to serve the human “I,” exalted to
the place of God. He does this from the -days of the apostles down to
the Last Day. This is something that happens in the church. Therefore
the Antichrist is more dangerous than all other enemies of the church.
No Roman caesar, no modern dictator is so dangerous as the enemy of
Christ within the church.
When Pliny wrote to Trajan, he reported the measures he had taken
against the Christians. These went so far as the execution of the “ob-
stinate” ones who refused to recant. In the same letter he tells of Chris-
tians who had fallen away from the church 20 years previously. Such
falling away in time of persecution is not the worst thing Christendom
has experienced in this regard. This was recognized when the way of
repentance was opened for those who had lapsed under pressure of
persecution. It was the way the first denier, Simon Peter, had gone.
Antichrist’s great art is that he can bring Christians to fall away without -
persecution. When Islam was sweeping over Christians lands, there
were Christians who almost clamored to become Moslems. Many of them
could give religious reasons for doing so. The Islamic rulers even tried

114
to forbid such conversions to Islam, or at least made them difficult, for
the sake of the head-tax which Christians were required to pay. The
highest art of the Antichrist is that he can make falling away a work of
religious piety.
4
In Christian history there is no one who has so deeply probed the
mystery of the Antichrist as Martin Luther, no one who so shuddered
before it. In Roman theology, even in the greatest teachers of the Roman
Church, the Antichrist has always appeared as a comparatively harmless
being. This figure of the distant end time may indeed be painted with
the most frightening colors, but one need not be too frightened when
one knows that this monster will rule for “not too long” a time, that is,
three and a half years (Scheeben-Atzberger, Handbuch der katholischen
Dogmatik, IV, 904). It belongs to the essence of the Roman Church
that it puts into a more or less distant future what Holy Scripture says
about the events of the end time. For the present, then, Christians need
not be much concerned about it.
For Luther the Antichrist was not so innocuous. Why did the An-
tichrist loom so large for him? Is this to be explained by the influence
of the apocalypticism of the Late Middle Ages, nourished by a mood
born of the feeling that a dying world was going under, as well as by
the despair of pious people in regard to the ever-more-decadent church?
This certainly was an influence upon Luther and upon the whole century
of the Reformation. He, along with most of his contemporaries, was
convinced of living in the eventide of the world. He never supposed that
the world would last much longer. In his On the Councils and the Church
he is prompted by Nicaea’s Easter canon to speak of the planned reform
of the Julian calendar, and he declares it unnecessary.
What does it matter to us Christians? Even if our Easter should co-
incide with the day of St. Philip and St. James [May1] (which I hope
will not happen before the end of the world) and move still further,
we still celebrate Easter daily with our proclamation of Christ and
our faith in him [WA 50,557; American Edition 41, 65].

Of the old calendar he says:

The old garment with its great tear has stayed on and on, and now it
may as well stay until the Last Day, which is imminent anyhow. Since
the old garment has endured being patched and torn for approximately
fourteen hundred years, it may as well let itself be patched and torn
for another hundred years; for I hope that everything will soon come
to an end [WA 50, 557; American Edition 41, 65].

115
 Vilmar once said that it would have been better if Luther had not
been so sure that the end of the world was about to happen. He would
then have given more thought to the future of the church. Even if this
be so, we must remember that Luther was not just captive to the way
the Late Middle Ages thought about the world, but that more than any
of his contemporaries he had immersed himself in the eschatology of the
New Testament. For him, as for the church of the apostles, ecclesiology
was a part of eschatology. Unlike the men of the 19th century who saw
the church as one of the great social constructions of human history, he
saw the church as the holy people of God of the end time, attacked by
the devil, led by the Antichrist into the great temptation to fall away,
and protected and preserved by Christ.
Therefore the Antichrist fills a far different role for Luther than
for the men of the Middle Ages. He is not just a frightening figure who
announces the Last Day; he is the great antagonist of Christ in the
drama of the church’s history. No one can know what the church is,
what the kingdom of Christ is, who does not know the Antichrist. There-
fore the Antichrist can only be understood from the vantage point of
the Gospel, and not from that of the Law, as the Middle Ages tried to
do. When the 12th century gave way to the 18th in the apocalyptically
minded Middle Ages, there were voices to be heard, at first hesitatingly
and softly, and then with mounting strength up to the days just before
the Reformation, asking “whether the pope is the Antichrist.” The rea-
sons given for this thesis were always those of the Law. The pope was
the guardian of God’s law on earth, but he did not keep it; he cast it
aside. He did not keep the law of Christ, for instance the command of
poverty. He is the greatest and most frightful sinner of all because of
his scandalous life, because of his greed and his tyranny.
Luther also knew of these sins and blamed the popes for them, but
as Hans Preuss has observed: “An utterly scandalous life, no matter
how bad, would never have persuaded him that the pope is the
Antichrist” (Vorstellungen vom Antichrist, 1906, p. 152). Luther always
warned the Evangelicals never to claim a higher level of morality than
their opponents. We are all of us sinners, and there is no sense in quar-
reling about who is the biggest one. In his Table Talk Luther made a
comparison between his battle with the pope and that of Wycliffe and
Hus.
Doctrine and life must be distinguished. Life is bad among us, as it
is among the papists, but we don’t fight about life and condemn the
papists on that account. Wycliffe and Huss didn’t know this and

116
 attacked [the papacy] for its life.I don’t scold myself into becoming
good, but I fight over the Word and whether our adversaries teach it
in its purity. That doctrine should be attacked—this has never before
happened. This is my calling. . . . to treat doctrine is to strike at the
most sensitive point ... (WATR 1, 294 [American Edition 54,110).

For Luther the pope is the Antichrist because his doctrine is anti-
Christian. With his doctrine he casts the Lord Christ from His throne
and puts himself there, there in the place which is Christ’s alone. Chris-
tendom, then, must choose between the Gospel and the doctrine of the
pope.
In light of this we can understand why Luther time and again spoke
of his lifework as the battle against the papacy. He spoke of his room
in the tower in Wittenberg as his “poor little room from which I stormed
the papacy, and for that it is worthy of always being remembered.” His
thus identifying his lifework needs no more quotations, but we may note
that he does this whenever he solemnly confesses his faith. So in the
Great Confession of 1528, in the Smalcald Articles, and in the Brief
Confession of 1544. For him to confess the Evangelical faith meant also
.to confess that the pope is the Antichrist. It pained him that this confes-
sion was missing in the Augsburg Confession. Hans Preus has pointed
out that just in those hours when it seemed he was about to die he
confessed his commitment to the battle against the pope as the Anti-
christ. In 1527, when he was very ill and expected to die, he was sad
that he had not been found worthy of martyrdom, but he comforted
himself with the fact that so it was even for St. John, who had written
a “much harder” book against the Antichrist. Ten years later, when he
was grievously ill at Smalcald, he said similar things. Finally, there is
the gripping prayer he prayed the night of his death. He thanked God
that He had made known to him His Son, “in whom I believe, whom I
have preached and confessed, whom I have loved and praised, and whom
the wretched pope and all the godless abuse, persecute and blaspheme”
(cf. G. Késtlin, Martin Luther, Vol. II, 1903, pp. 170, 632; H. Preus,
p. 146). Also in the wills which Luther made we find the thought ex-
pressed that the battle against the Antichrist was the battle of his life.
This battle cannot be explained by reference either to his temper-
ament or to political motives. The former may apply at most to particular
expressions which betray the irascibleness of an old man. These the
Lutheran Church has rejected, as also have non-Lutheran critics who
recognized them for what they were. The battle was not occasioned by
moral outrage or by personal dislike. Of these we find more than enough

117
not only in the Late Middle Ages but also among good Catholics at the
time of the Reformation. On the contrary, Luther had a sort of human
sympathy for Leo X. The recognition that the pope is the Antichrist is
for him much rather the other side of the knowledge of the Gospel, and
the battle against the pope as the Antichrist is therefore the other side
of the battle for the Gospel. To understand this profound connection is
to understand what the Gospel is and who the pope is. Here is the reason
why the Evangelical Lutheran Church accepts what (not how) Luther
taught of the pope as Antichrist and why it proclaims in its Confessions
as church doctrine that the pope is the Antichrist.

5
It should never have been questioned that this really is church
doctrine and not merely a theological opinion of Luther’s and of early
Lutheran theology. On what grounds could one remove from the Confes-
sions the large article on the Antichrist in the Smalcald Articles (II,
IV)? The same is true of Apology VII and VIII, 24; XXIII, 25; XXIV,
51 (in all of which the German text uses the word “Antichrist,” while
Melanchthon’s Latin text is content with citing Dan. 11) and in the
Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, 39: “It is plain that the
marks of the Antichrist coincide with those of the pope’s kingdom and
his followers.” Yet if these passages are not in accord with Scripture,
they should be removed. First, however, it would have to be shown
that they are not in accord with Scripture, and second, if that were
shown to be the case, the doctrine expressed there would have to be
solemnly retracted before all the world.
One cannot, however, do it the way August Vilmar suggests: “That
the pope in Rome is not the Antichrist, as used to be supposed in the
Evangelical Church, is now so self-evident that any refutation of such
an unclear notion is quite unnecessary and would indeed seem quite
foolish” (Dogmatik, II, 306). Vilmar himself would likely have revised
this statement, and many another which he wrote regarding the Roman
Church, had he lived to witness Vatican I. That there may be no doubt
about our position, let it be clearly said: A theologian who merely be-
cause it happens to be in the Confessions lets the doctrine stand that
the pope is the Antichrist, and is not solidly convinced that it is so,
cannot truthfully be called a Lutheran. He cannot escape the charge of —
slandering the papacy.
Why did the Lutheran Church accept Luther’s teaching on this
point? What is the meaning of this doctrine? We must first clearly rec-

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ognize what the church did not accept. There were items in Luther’s
view of history which were not accepted, specifically that the end of the
world would come not later than within the next century. With such
presuppositions Luther could not possibly answer the question as to
what new forms the Antichrist might assume in subsequent centuries.
The church can have no doctrine which answers such a question. The
church can and must teach that all the eschatological prophecies of Holy
Scripture come to fulfillment. How that may happen lies beyond its
knowing. We can never say with certainty how what Scripture says in
apocalyptic picture language will be realized. The fulfillment of all proph-
ecies is greater than could be grasped by those who heard them, even
by those who heard them in faith. The Lutheran Church teaches nothing
in its Confessions as to how God may let the prophecy of the Antichrist
come to fulfillment in the hidden future, that is, what form the Antichrist
may take in the final terrors of the end time. What our Confessions can
teach, and do teach, this and no more, is that in the “last time” which
we can see, in the time of the church until the present day, the prophecy
of the Antichrist has found fulfillment in the papacy.
Luther himself never supposed that there was nothing to be seen
of the Antichrist beyond the papacy. In his Great Confession of 1528 he
says:
The papacy is assuredly the true realm of Antichrist, the real anti-
Christian tyrant, who sits in the temple of God and rules with human
commandments, as Christ in Matthew 24 [:24] and Paul in II Thes-
salonians 2 [:3 f.] declare; although the Turk and all heresies, wherever
they may be, are also included in this abomination which according to
prophecy will stand in the holy place, but are not to be compared to
the papacy (WA 26, 507 [American Edition 37, 367 f.)).

This always remained his conviction, and Lutheran theology always

followed him in this matter.
But why is the pope the “true” Antichrist? The Smalcald Articles
give the following answer:
[He] has raised himself over and set himself against Christ, for the
pope will not permit Christians to be saved except by his own power,
which amounts to nothing since it is neither established nor com-
manded by God. This is actually what St. Paul calls exalting oneself
over and against God (II, IV, 10).

It is really unnecessary to quote the passages in which overzealous

devotees of the pope have predicated of him what belongs only to God.

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This they did and were not excommunicated for it. Among them were
the medieval canonists Augustine of Ancona and Zenzelinus of Cassanis.
(Documentation is given [in Tappert, p. 300, and] in Bekenntnisschrif-
ten, p. 431.) Among them also were the Ultramontanists of the 19th
century who so flattered Pius IX. What the Confessions teach is that
when the pope promulgates a dogmatic decision, one which has no basis
in Holy Scripture, and makes men’s salvation or damnation depend on
their obedience or disobedience toward it, then he is setting himself in
the place of Christ, in the place of God. This is what Luther, with sharp
prophetic vision, saw as the essence of the papacy, even though he could
not yet know the Council of Trent or Vatican I.
If there was any doubt on the part of some Lutherans as to the
correctness of Luther’s judgment, then this was removed when Pius
IX, with the consent of the Vatican Council, on 18 July 1870 promulgated
the constitution Pastor aeternus. In it eternal salvation was denied to
those who consciously oppose the dogma that the pope has the exercise
of direct episcopal power over the whole church, over the infallibility
with which Christ has equipped His church, and that his ex cathedra
decisions in questions of faith and morals are, “of themselves, and not
from the consensus of the church,” true and irreformable (ex sese, non
autem ex consensu Ecclesiae irreformabiles [Denzinger 3074]). And
when the first of these new ex cathedra decisions was proclaimed—the
dogma of the Assumption of Mary, in 1950, on All Saints’ Day, the day
inseparably connected with the Reformation—the shock wave hit all
Christendom. Here became visible something of the reality which Lu-
ther had recognized with deep dread—the reality of the man who puts
himself in God’s place and proclaims his fantasies as divine revelation.
The pope is either Christ’s vicar or he is the Antichrist. That is the
alternative which Luther recognized quite clearly. Either the papacy is
indeed instituted by God or it is an institution “instituted by the devil”
(Luther: vom Teufel gestiftet). This institution is not merely human. It
is more than a heretical institution. It is also something fundamentally
different from the great non-Christian powers. They launch their attacks
against the Christian faith from the outside, and will continue to do so.
Whatever devilish attacks may be made against the church by the fearful
totalitarian powers of the world, no representative of these powers has
yet claimed to be Christ’s vicar and to speak and act in His name. They
set up their temple next to the church and seek to displace it. In the
papacy, however, the man who deifies himself has worked his way into
the church. This is what is so horrendous in the papacy.

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 And since 1870 the church, insofar as it has placed itself under the
papacy, can never get free of this. Not only are the dogmas which the
pope produces irreformable (among them the constitution Pastor aeter-
nus), but there is no power above him. “No one shall judge the supreme
see.” This fundamental law is adduced in the Treatise on the Power and
Primacy of the Pope (50) as evidence of the anti-Christian character of
the papacy. It is now set in concrete in Canon 1556 of the Codex of
Canon Law (Codex iuris canonici). No council can ever judge the pope
or in any way stand over him. If the pope dies during an ecumenical
council, the council is at the moment of his death interrupted, and can
only be begun again, or not begun again, by the new pope (Canon 229,
Codex iuris canonici). Both according to [canon] law and according to
the doctrine of the Roman Church, this institution can never be removed
from the church or be deprived of its claims. Of all the great persecutions
which Christianity has endured, those words apply which we hear from
the faith of the ancient church, “It is a little cloud; it will pass.” Of the
sinister temptation which the Antichrist is for the church, it can only
be said that he will continue until the returning Christ destroys him.

6
In Letter No. 18, “Is the Pope Really Still the Antichrist?” we
pointed out, over against the position taken by Hans Asmussen, that
the papacy today is essentially the same as the papacy which confronted
Luther. Responses came also from some Roman Catholic readers of that
letter. Among them was a venerable Jesuit Father [Cardinal Bea] who
for decades has worked for better understanding between our confes-
sions. They sought to persuade the writer that a revision of the old
Lutheran judgment of the papacy is made necessary simply by the fact
that a common front of all Christian churches is called for against the
militant atheism of modern Communism. And it is a widely held notion
that the judgment of Luther and the Confessions on this point is only
of temporary significance, that it cannot be maintained in the modern
world if only because the papacy is not in the hands of such morally
vulnerable characters as in the time of Luther. At that time one may
have observed the power of “lawlessness” [2 Thess. 2:3], whereas now-
adays, on the contrary, the papacy is a stronghold of God’s law and the
Christian religion. It has also been said that the first pope to die a
martyr’s death will put an end to the talk about the pope being the
Antichrist. Now we must respond to these objections.

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 Concerning the morals of the popes, Luther long since put an end
to the notion that here are the grounds for recognizing the pope as the
Antichrist.
As to the papacy being the guardian of God’s law and the Christian
religion in the modern world, it all depends on what is meant by law
and by Christian religion. We have already observed that it is hardly
by chance that the great, bloody revolutions took place in Catholic lands.
The Catholic countries of Europe and South America have tumbled from
one revolution to another. There seems to be only one Catholic king left
in the world, in Belgium, and his throne is none too sure. What of Russia?
One cannot call it aProtestant country. The mausoleum of Lenin stands
next to the Chapel of the Iberian Madonna—a warning as to where the
path of giving reverence to men can lead, even if it begins in the refined
rites of the cult of Mary. Whoever knows the inner history of Europe’s
Catholic countries, in particular of the ecclesiastical principalities, and
above all of the Papal States, will recognize the fearful consequences
for God’s church of not having heeded the Lutheran Reformation’s warn-
ing against mixing church and state—something that can also be ob-
served in the Lutheran Church itself.
The statement that the papacy is the stronghold of God’s law in the
world has its context in the confusion and ignorance of the modern world
as to what is law given by God. Is it to be regarded as divine law that
the supposed vicar of Christ makes the demand that all mankind shall
be obedient to him in all decisions concerning faith and morals? Don’t
people see that here we have the source of the totalitarian systems of
our day?
Mussolini and Hitler were sons of the Roman Church. Stalin even
got as far as candidate of theology. There have certainly been absolute
states before, and they came out of Spain and France. Modern totali-
tarianism is characterized by its claim to have power over the souls of
men. This was not so in the world empires of antiquity. A citizen had
indeed to go along with the state cult, but he was left to think about it
what he liked. That souls can be compelled to a faith, that was first
discovered by Catholicism, and secular imitators of the Roman Catholic
church-system have made use of this discovery. Without an infallible
pope there would never have been an infallible Hitler. The total state
was born along with the total church on July 18, 1870.
How deep this connection is can be seen in the history of the last
generation, whose documents are now more and more coming out of the
archives. Fascism could not have happened in Italy without the pope.

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The history of the ’30s reveals how close was the tie between them, as
well as what all was included in the Lateran treaties. The moral re-
sponsibility for all the horrors of the Abyssinian war, if it can be called
a war, is shared by the Vatican. And it was not only the Madonna of
Fatima who rescued the Iberian Peninsula from Bolshevism or what
was so called.
We Germans who lived through it, those who had their eyes open
in the fateful year of our people, the fearful year 1933, know who it was
that helped Hitler to power. Without that help he would not have came
to power except by violent revolution. It was not only the foolish Evan-
gelical pastors, not only the decadent German citizenry, but the Vatican
that did this. To the horror of thinking German Catholics, the Vatican
ordered the dissolution of the Center Party because National Socialism
was needed for the struggle against the East. For that the German
people were sacrificed. Then, to be sure, when the concordat was broken
(that gentlemen’s agreement between two parties of whom each was
convinced that the other was no gentleman), and it became clear in Rome
that the stronger cards were in the other hand, then all of a sudden
there was staunch defense of the very holy human rights which had not
long ago been betrayed to Hitler.
We mention these things here only to refute the pious legend that
the papacy is the stronghold of civil order and God’s law in the world.
The Roman Church is the continuation of the Roman Empire with other
instrumentalities. It is the empire in the form of a church, at bottom a
synthesis of church and world, of divine and human, and therefore it is
that temple where man has put himself on the throne of God.
The Roman Church is indeed the defender of the Christian religion,
but of what sort? In this Christian religion God is not the only Lord
who is served. Our Lord Christ said clearly that one cannot serve two
lords. Putting another lord beside Him, or another lady, like Mary Queen
of Heaven, has in it a fatal propensity to displace Him. In theory it
sounds fine when it is said that grace is superior to nature and the human
will, Christ to His mother, the Redeemer to the coredemptrix, the single
Mediator of the New Testament to the mediatrix of all graces. But when
Catholic people are taught that the way to Christ is by way of Mary,
then she has practically become the savior. Then one has to say of the
pope as Luther did in his last confession: “What good does it do him
greatly to exalt with his mouth the true God, the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Spirit, and to make a splendid pretense of living a Christian
life?” (Brief Confession Concerning the Holy Sacrament, 1544 [WA 54,

123
160; American Edition 38, 310]). But we have already discussed this
aspect of Catholicism in Letter No. 13, and so need not repeat what
was said there of the organic connection of the institution of the papacy
with synergistic doctrine and the cult of Mary.
Only one thing more. A modern pope simply cannot be a martyr
for the Christian faith like the old bishops of Rome. He would die not
only for faith in Christ, but at the same time also for the superstition
of Fatima; not only for the doctrine of the Gospel, but at the same time
also for those errors which have been proclaimed as divine revelations
necessary for salvation, such as the dogmas of the Immaculate Concep-
tion and of the Assumption of Mary, and the universal episcopacy and
infallibility of the pope. He would die also for the false claim that he is
Christ’s vicar on earth, to whom every human being, on pain of losing
his salvation, owes obedience in all dogmatic decisions, as though to the
Lord Himself. This is what has to be said to those who maintain that
Luther’s judgment on the papacy is no longer current.

7
Among theologians it should not be necessary to spend many words
to make it clear that the judgments which the Confessions of our church
make about the papacy are statements of theology and doctrine, the
opposite of those outbursts against individual popes and against the
Roman Church that are produced by human anger and hatred. Luther’s
judgment against the pope has nothing to do with that of French or
Italian Freemasons. It is also quite different from that of German pol-
iticians who from time to time tell of the injuries done the German people
from the end of the time of the Staufers [13th century] up to the present.
The judgment of the Lutheran Confessions is also something quite dif-
ferent from what was heard from German Protestantism during the
Kulturkampf [in the 1870s], from the Evangelical League in Germany,
from the Away-from-Rome movement in Austria [early 20th century],.
or from the anti-Rome movement in the United States unleashed by the
proposal that the United States have an ambassador to the Holy See.
What do any of these movements know of the Antichrist? They can
know nothing of the Antichrist, for they do not know what the Gospel
is and what the means of grace are, which have been given by Christ. -
It was Luther’s deep understanding of the Gospel that enabled him
on the one hand to recognize its fearful perversion in the papacy, and
on the other hand to give a positive evaluation of those elements of the

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true church of Christ that still live on in the Roman Churehé The same
Smalcald Articles which so sharply delineate the doctrine of the An-
tichrist also acknowledge that “the sublime articles of the divine maj-
esty” “are not matters of dispute or contention,” and give a considerable
list of those matters which they wish to discuss with the Roman theo-
logians. In the eyes of the world, which knows not the Gospel, this is
an inexplicable contradiction. To understand it, one must know much
about the reality of the church—of the church as Christ’s kingdom which
must always struggle against the kingdom of the devil in this last and
evil time.
It is not only human beings who are engaged in this drama. It was
not only Eugenio Pacelli who proclaimed the false doctrine of the As-
sumption of Mary as a revelation given to Christianity. It was not ac-
tually and not alone Giovanni Medici who cast Luther out of the church.
It was not actually Alexander Farnese who repudiated sola fide and so
also the Lord Christ Himself. Rather it was the Antichrist who spoke
and acted in and through them. For this reason we, as also Luther did,
can have some human, sympathetic understanding for those men who
bore the fearful office of the papacy. This is especially true in the case
of those popes who, as far as human eyes can see, were noble figures
in the history of the papacy.
As did our fathers before us, so we too know ourselves to be bound
together in the one holy church of Christ with all those who live within
the true church also in the Roman Church—those who are born of the
means of grace, the Gospel and the sacraments, which have not yet
entirely perished in the Roman Church. We Lutherans should also be
shamed by the true and living faith in Christ that is present within the
Roman Church in spite of the Antichrist and his seductive wiles. In the
Roman Church there are Christians who truly live from the Gospel that
is still there, from the Gospel in the prayer in the Canon of the Mass
itself, “not judging our merits, but forgiving our iniquities.” We know
of Christians there who, when it came to die, knew nothing save Christ
and Him crucified, and who died in faith in Him, forgetting about the
whole churchly apparatus and the world of saints: “King of majesty
tremendous, Who dost free salvation send us, Fount of pity, then be-
friend us” [The Lutheran Hymnal, 607:8]. To recognize this is to see
why Luther laid such weight on the fact that the Antichrist would not
be the Antichrist unless he were actually seated “in the temple,” the
church of God.

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 We are aware, honored brethren, of what a responsibility we take
upon ourselves when we today repeat in such a way the old doctrine of
the Lutheran Church concerning the pope as the Antichrist. We know
that we shall have to answer for this before the judgment seat of Him
who someday will judge the claims of all churches, the doctrine of all
confessions. His judgment is the decisive one for us, not the opinions
of men.
The majority of Western Christians today, and their theologians,
including Lutheran ones, show no knowledge of this doctrine of the
Reformation. And why is this? Because our generation has to a large
extent lost any grasp of the great realities of the faith. One is struck
here in Australia, on the edge of the Asiatic world, when meeting Chris-
tians from the “younger churches” of the mission fields, by how entirely
different is their relationship to the New Testament and to the realities
given us there. For them this is all new, fresh, and alive, while for us
Europeans or Americans it is covered with a layer of dust centuries
thick. The Epistles and Gospels which are read in church on Sunday we
already know, or think we know. The hymns we sing once poured out
of hearts made glad by the newly discovered Gospel—but that was long
ago.
Here lies the deepest reason why Luther’s doctrine of the Antichrist
has become strange to us. One must know much about the reality of
Christ, about His real presence, about His actions, dealings, and suf-
ferings in today’s world, in order to see the Antichrist in his manifold
appearances, also the most splendid and powerful ones. One must lit-
erally live from the Gospel as the message of the sinner’s justification
in order to know what it means to exclude this Gospel from the church
in the name of Christ and to deny salvation to those who teach, believe,
and confess it.
God grant us all, pastors and congregations, teachers and students
of theology, open eyes and an ever deeper understanding of His Word,
and thereby an ever clearer view of the reality of the Antichrist, wher-
ever and in whatever form we may encounter him, even if it be in our
own Lutheran Church!
With this wish I greet you, dear brothers in the ministry, in these
Easter days, in the unity of the faith.

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 THE CHURCH LIVES!
A Sermon on Acts 2:42-47
for the First Sunday
After Trinity
June 27, 1943

When this war is finally over, then the question will be heard again,
echoing over the scorched earth and through the exhausted people of
the West: “What about the church of God?” Thus it has always been
when a great war had thoroughly devastated the natural fellowships of
birth and history. So it was after the Thirty Years’ War, after the
Napoleonic wars, and after the First World War. At such times Chris-
tians have remembered what they confess Sunday by Sunday before the
altar: “I believe in the holy Christian church, the communion of saints.”
What kind ofa reality is meant by this? Whoever has ears to hear already
perceives this question struggling to be heard in the world and among
our German people.
Yes, what sort of a reality stands behind this confession? Perhaps
none at all? Is it perhaps just an old formula that has lost any meaning,
when in the midst of the most dreadful of all wars, which has long since
stopped being an honorable, knightly battle, when in the midst of this
war, Sunday after Sunday, yes day after day, the confession is made in
a thousand languages: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian
church, the communion of saints”?
No, it is no mere formula. Here is a reality. It may, to be sure, be
overlooked or forgotten. It may be hidden from our eyes as is the sun
when it has gone down in the evening sky. But it is a reality that is still
there, as surely as the sun which has set is still there, even if our eyes
do not see it. No, it is much more sure than that. For whether the sun
will rise again tomorrow, that I cannot know with certainty. But that
God the Father, the almighty Creator of heaven and earth, is still
there—that I surely know. That Jesus Christ is Lord, to whom all power

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has been given in heaven and on earth, that the Holy Spirit, who pro-
ceeds from the Father and the Son, moves over the chaos of this time
as He did in the beginning over the dark depths—that I know. And
therefore I also know that there exists the church of which the creed
speaks: the church which is the people of God, the body of Christ, the
temple of the Holy Spirit. What better place can there be for deepening
our understanding of the reality of the church than where the church
first makes its appearance before our eyes in human history, at least
insofar as it can be seen by our eyes?
So God’s church comes before our eyes in our text which brings to
an end the great Pentecost chapter in the Acts of the Apostles. The
scene begins with the Pentecost miracle, followed by Peter’s sermon
and the baptism of the 3,000. Then the life of the congregation is de-
scribed in a few matter-of-fact words, and yet they vibrate with what
happened in the transforming events of those days: the inexpressible
joy of the newly baptized, the simplicity of faith with which they devoted
themselves to the apostles’ teaching, the awe of their hearts before the
wonders of the Spirit, the brotherly love which is ready to offer every-
thing, the prayers, the celebrations of the Sacrament, and the praise of
God.
It is not difficult to see why this text has always been so profoundly
moving, and has prompted so much in the history of the church. The
way it has stirred people may be compared with the account of the rich
young ruler, which ever and again has turned people around and brought
them to the commitment of all their earthly possessions. So also Jesus’
charge to the Twelve as He sent them out (Matt. 10) was ever and again
used as a mirror in which the church of the Middle Ages recognized its
sin and apostasy. So then also what Luke reports of the first congre-
gation in Acts 2 and 4 has been heard ever and again since the early
days of the church as a call to repentance. “They devoted themselves
to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and
the prayers.” And we? “All who believed were together and had all
things in common.” And we? “ ... continuing daily with one accord
...” [KJV]. And we? “. .. with glad and generous hearts, praising
God. . .” And we? Such questioning has ever and again been prompted
by the account of the first congregation, and‘so it must be. Here a mirror
is held up to the church of all times, a call to repentance. -
It is this only, however, when it is rightly understood. It can be
misunderstood, just as the account of the rich young ruler and Jesus’
charge to the Twelve have been misunderstood. It is understood falsely

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when one sees in it only Law. How often this has happened! [People
have said that] the church today should be as it was then, and therefore
we must again make it like that. How often in the history of the church
has the attempt been made to copy it! We see it in the Anabaptists at
the time of the Reformation, in the Philadelphian societies and other
fellowship constructions of Pietism, in Irving’s Catholic Apostolic
Church in England, in the large Disciples of Christ denomination in
America. There seems to be no end to the sects and fellowships which
make this attempt.
The view is widely held among them that in the original church all
property was held in common, a sort of noble communism. The New
Testament tells us nothing of this. In the case of Ananias and Sapphira
we are told explicitly that everyone could keep his property if he wished.
There was no law. What we are told is that no one said of his property
that it was his. Rather, they disposed what they had for the benefit of
others, for those who were poorer. We are told that “they (not all) sold
their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had
need”—a sort of common chest. Probably these were those who came
from Galilee to Jerusalem to await Christ’s return. Of the mother of
John Mark, who wrote our oldest Gospel, we are told in Acts 12 that
she owned a house in Jerusalem.
The idea of communism (mark well, the communism of love, which
does not say, “What is thine is mine,” but rather “What is mine is thine’)
is a very idealistic notion. And this ideal is read into the account in Acts.
It then becomes an example to be emulated by organizing Christian
associations in which private property is abolished. What eventuates
can be seen in some of the saddest stories in church history: congre-
gations that began as a fellowship of Jesus ending up as a synagogue of
Satan.
The urge to make a copy of the original church has prompted some
to fasten on “they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching . . . and
many wonders and signs were done through the apostles.” How can a
copy be made of the original church without its most important office,
the office of the apostles? Therefore let us make some new apostles!
Such is the folly arrived at in England in the last century by Edward
Irving. So first there was the Catholic Apostolic Church, and later an-
other one called the New Apostolic Church.
Or it could go like this: In the original church the Christians were
not called Lutherans or Reformed, Presbyterians or Congregationalists,
Methodists or Baptists, Catholics or Orthodox. They were called dis-

129
ciples. So let us have a church of the Disciples of Christ. Such was the
thinking of a pious American pastor a hundred years ago. Disciples of
Christ is what all Christians want to be. Here is quite the simplest way,
then, to overcome the divisions of Christianity. But naturally this move-
ment also did not renew the one church, but only made another new
one, even though very large and respectable. If I should attempt, my
dear Christian hearers, to give you only a sketch of all such attempts,
we would still be sitting here in church at noon. All these fellowships
resulted from attempts to understand and obey our text as a law for
the renewal of the church.
Our text is perverted when it is used as a law for shaping the life
of the church. When men do that, they end up where all men of the Law
end up—either in deep despair or in titanic arrogance.
Many, many Christians have ended in deep despair, because they
did not attain the blessed state of this first congregation. I remember
such a one from the time when I was serving as a pastor in Berlin. He
was a popular preacher, something of a revivalist, who had the gift of
giving his testimony of the Lord Christ to mass gatherings of Berlin
workers. He had at one time, as a Red sailor and as a member of the
Soldiers’ Council in Kiel, participated in the revolution. Then he was
converted to the Christian faith and became a missionary at large (Volks-
missionar). He wanted to reform the church by turning into reality
what was said of the original church. This man finally went to Russia
and became a Bolshevist agitator. He had despaired of being able to
renew the church today according to the model of the original church,
and so to reform it.
The other way things go with men of the Law is the titanic arrogance
of those who imagine that it will be easy to renew the church in the
ideal form of the church at its beginning. The arrogance which here
comes to expression is a hidden or unspoken faith in man. It should not
be hard [they say] to be and to achieve what the first congregation was
and achieved. The first Christians were only men, but what splendid
men they were! Men of such splendid faith, men of such splendid broth-
erly love! What can hinder us from being such as they?
What hinders us is the same as hindered them. This is something
we must be quite clear about, dear congregation, if we would be honest
and not a prey to false illusions. As at all times, so also in that first time-
the church was a little group of poor sinners. If you want to understand
the original church and its meaning for the church of all times, then you
must first recognize that they were such as we are, poor sinners. They

130
had no other strengths than we have. They were no better than the
Christians of all times. If they were holy, then it was not in any other
way than that way in which poor sinners at any time are holy—holy by
the fact that Christ died for their sins. He was made “our wisdom, our
righteousness and sanctification and redemption” [1 Cor. 1:30]. Our wis-
dom is Christ. Our righteousness is Christ. Our sanctification is Christ.
Our redemption is Christ. So it was in the first congregation, a congre-
gation of nothing but poor sinners.
So the New Testament tells of it. It was the congregation in which
the wicked case of Ananias and Sapphira could happen. It was the con-
gregation, as we are told in Acts 6, in which, in spite of love communism,
in spite of the splendid caring for the poor, it could happen that “the
Hellenists murmured against the Hebrews because their widows were
neglected in the daily distribution.” The first quarrel in the first con-
gregation was about money, about how it was allotted from the church’s
treasury. There was, if one may say so, something not quite straight
in the way the gifts collected in the congregation were being allotted.
Then follow the controversies in the church between Paul and Bar-
nabas, between Paul and the first congregation, between Paul and Peter,
and then between Paul and Peter on the one side and James on the
other. And so it goes on and on in the early church. No, the early church
was anything but a church of saints who are to serve as examples of
splendid Christians to be emulated through all subsequent centuries.
The church of the first century is a communion of saints in the same
sense as the church of every century: It is a congregation of justified
sinners. The first Christians also lived from nothing else than the daily
forgiveness of their sins, as we confess in the Small Catechism: “In this
Christian church he daily and abundantly forgives all my sins, and the
sins of all believers.” The holiness of the church is the holiness of Christ.
We correctly understand what our text tells us about what happened
in the first church, the congregation of saints in Jerusalem, when we
hear not the praise of men but only “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord,” the
everlasting song of the church: “You only are holy; You only are the
Lord; You only .. . are Most High.”
So the church is never something made or put together by pious
people, but it is the church of the Lord Christ. Not in the religion which
men do, even if it is the highest and most beautiful blossoming of human
religious activity, not in the faith of a Peter or a Paul does the church’s
glory have its source. Of that source we are told in our text: “They
devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the

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breaking of bread and the prayers.” Doctrine of the apostles, fellowship,
breaking of bread, prayers—in these four things is hidden the secret of
the church.
“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching.” They did not
grow tired of hearing the words spoken by the apostles, the witness to
Jesus Christ, His incarnation, His deeds and words, and that He “died
for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, that
He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” In
these words, transmitted by Paul (1 Cor. 15:3-4), we have the oldest
formulations of the apostolic proclamation, the first steps of the later
creeds: “. . . dead, and buried. . . the third day he rose from the dead.”
That was the doctrine of the apostles. That was what they repeated day
by day.
“We are witnesses to all that He did both in the country of the Jews
and in Jerusalem. They put Him to death by hanging Him on a tree;
but God raised Him on the third day and made Him manifest; not to all
the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and
drank with Him after He rose from the dead” (Acts 10, 39-41). It was
always the same message, repeated with sublime monotony by the apos-
tles, who were eyewitnesses, and then after their death by those to
whom the apostolic proclamation was committed. The church of all times
lives from the doctrine of the apostles.
But does it really? Must not the church adjust its message to the
contemporary situation? The reproach of not moving with the times was
heard in Germany through the 18th and 19th centuries from those who
held a naive faith in progress. Why go on preaching the same as Peter
did in the Acts of the Apostles? How many theologians, indeed whole
churches, finally had enough! They did not continue in the apostles’
doctrine. They preached something else. Forty years ago they preached
sermons on Goethe and Schiller. They preached the current view of the
world, although most world views are lucky if they last as long as 30
years. And the churches did not become fuller, but emptier. And rightly
so. For since 1848 any member of German society could read in the
newspaper every morning as he drank his coffee what the latest and
only acceptable world view is. For this I do not need to go to church.
But where the church continued in the apostles’ doctrine, there the
congregation remained.
To the world it is inexplicable that the church lives on, always
preaching the same old thing. In fact, it is because the same old thing
goes on being preached, the apostles’ doctrine, that the church goes on

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living. This is because the apostles’ doctrine is the everlasting Word of
God to all men, to all nations, to all times. It is the Gospel of Jesus
Christ, the eternal Son of God, “who for us men and for our salvation
came down from heaven. . . and was made man.” He “was put to death
for our trespasses and raised for our justification” [Rom. 4:25]. He “is
seated at the right hand of the Father . . . and His kingdom shall have
no end.” The apostolic doctrine witnesses to the Word of God become
flesh. In this witness, in the simple words of the apostles, in the straight-
forward words preached in the church, Christ, the eternal Word, is
Himself present. Therefore the church lives from the apostolic doctrine.
“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship.”
Also in this word “fellowship” something of the deep, divine mystery
of the church lies hidden. For this word means something else than what
we human beings otherwise call fellowship. Of human fellowship we have
two kinds. There is the natural fellowship into which we are born. This
is there before we are, and we are born into it without our consent.
Such is the fellowship of our family and people. Then there is the fel-
lowship which occurs because we wish it to, a fellowship we enter vol-
untarily. There is such a fellowship when we more or less voluntarily
join a gymnastics club, a party, an association that has a purpose with
which we sympathize.
But the fellowship which binds together the members of the church
never arises in such a way. We are not born into the church, nor can
we join it. These are two very serious misunderstandings. “Those who
received his word”—the words of Peter’s Pentecost sermon having gone
into them working faith—“were baptized, and there were added that
day about three thousand souls” [Acts 2:41]. They “were baptized”—
passive voice. They “were added”—passive voice. The One who added
them was the One who called them by the Gospel and kindled the light
of faith in their hearts.
In this way, and in no other, did we also become members of the
church. You also were added by the Holy Spirit when you were baptized.
Baptism is not some symbolic action, an initiation rite done or devised
by men. It is a sacrament of Jesus Christ. And in the sacraments God
is already now at this time doing something with us which He plans to
do at the end of all things. In a sacrament the future becomes a present
reality; it is eternity that has become time. So it is in Holy Absolution,
as that doctrine is confessed in our church. Already now the forgiving
words, which free us from sin, speak to us the verdict of the Final
Judgment. So in Holy Communion we are given the fellowship of the

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body and blood of Christ, which will not come to consummation until
the end of all things.
Your resurrection began when you were baptized. “We were buried
therefore with Him [Christ] by baptism into death, so that as Christ
was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk
in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). With Christ you died at that time, with
Him you were buried, with Him you shall rise. With Him, for you have
been made a member of His body. That is the deep secret of the fel-
lowship of the saints. So we, “though many, are one body. . . . For by
one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” (1 Cor. 12:12-13). And
again: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for
we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17). That is certainly a
fellowship which the world does not know and can never understand.
It is the imperishable communion of saints.
Perhaps some of you are thinking that this is all some theological
theory, some theology pushed too far. Such thoughts come to us because
we are children of the modern world, which no longer knows of the
profound reality of the living Christ. The church of which our text speaks
knew about it. It lived thereby. Our fathers in the church of the Ref-
ormation also lived thereby. Whatever there is of genuine, deep broth-
erly love in the church of all times has grown out of this love. Let me
mention only one instance, that of the church’s loving service (Diakonie).
This was the ancient church’s claim to fame, even among the heathen.
“See, how they love one another!” There was then such a caring for the
poor and the sick, for the lonely and helpless, as the world had never
known before. For the ancient civilization was a civilization without
mercy, just as our world is threatening to again become a world without
mercy. But all that loving activity would never have happened without
the Lord’s Supper. For all loving service proceeds from the altar. So it
was in the early church, when the deacons and deaconesses brought the
consecrated bread and wine to the sick, the lonely, the helpless, those
who could not come to church. With this they brought along the con-
gregation’s gifts of love, and thereby the comfort, the help, and the
fellowship of the Christian brotherhood. When in the 19th century there
was a revival of the Christian diaconate, we again see such loving service
going out from the altar. In Neuendettelsau the deaconess houses bé-
came places of renewed liturgy and renewed celebration of Holy Com-
munion. You have only to attend a divine service in Bethel [a well-
known home for the handicapped at bielefeld, Germany] to realize why

134
Father Bodelschwingh [its founder] maintained the Lutheran liturgy
with such great faithfulness.
But the diaconate is only one evidence of the profound connection
between the sacraments and the works of practical service in the com-
munion of saints, that communion which is inexplicable to any human
reason, because it is the fellowship of the body of Christ. This fellowship
goes with Holy Communion, which in our text is called by its ancient
code name, “the breaking of bread.” “... breaking bread in their
homes”—they had no other place for this. “They devoted themselves to
the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread... .”
These together.
For the church today, and also our Lutheran Church, there is noth-
ing more needful than pondering this fact. When fellowship is separated
from Holy Communion both are diminished. Today Holy Communion
has been pushed into the background—the celebration which was the
core of the divine service for all Christians until the Reformation, and
still was so in the first two centuries of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Now we often find that it has been removed from the service. Certainly
not every member of the congregation can or should receive Communion
every Sunday, but the Sacrament is to be celebrated in its midst.
But is there not a danger of this becoming one of those laws that
ever and again have been taken from our text? No, this is no law, no
more than the admonition to continue in the apostles’ doctrine and the
fellowship, and to be steadfast in prayer. Also prayer—our text uses
the plural—is profoundly connected with the celebration of the Lord’s
Supper. Without these prayers, without the joy and rejoicing of the
congregation overflowing with thanksgiving, without the irrepressible
praise of what great and marvelous things the Lord has done, without
the worship of the present Lord Christ, there can be no church.
They praised God “with glad and generous hearts.” All liturgy of
the church, all praying of the church, is only an echo of this praise of
God, of these soaring-to-heaven prayers of Christianity’s first Pentecost
season. Then the Spirit of God enlivened hearts, enabling them to pray.
For it is true also of the church that “we do not know how to pray as
we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep
for words” (Rom. 8:26). And not in vain do we call upon the Holy Spirit
as follows:
You are the Spir’t who teaches
How one should pray aright.
Your prayers are ever answered,

135
 Your songs are ever bright.
To heav’n goes up Your call,
And for our help is pleading,
Till He the help is giving,
Whose aid is there for all.

The picture of the first church given in our text is a gripping picture
indeed. But we must not forget that the light which shines about the
first congregation in Jerusalem is not only the daybreak red of the
church’s morning, but also the sunset red of an earthly people. They
were a perishing people, and a generation later that judgment was ful-
filled which goes out over every nation that rejects Christ. The Jewish
Christian congregation fled across the Jordan, prompted by a prophetic
utterance. Their role was over, bound up with the history of their people.
But Christ’s church did not come to an end. The call of God’s Holy
Spirit went out to the peoples of the heathen world, and then they in
their day were alive with the truth of these words: “They devoted them-
selves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread
and the prayers.” Nations pass away, but the church continues. And
where there is a people which no longer has a future, there the church
still has a future, because the future of the church is the future of Jesus
Christ. Amen.

136
pos. | SASSE, Hermann
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284.1 SASSE, Hermann

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We Confess the
Church

BETHEL SEMBNARY WEST

LIBRARY
6116 Arosa Street
San Diego, CA 92115-3902

DEMCO
 Hermann Sasse (1895-1976). is widely recognized as one of the 20th
‘century’s foremost confessional Lutheran scholars. In order to enable
the English-speaking world to study some of his finest expressions of
Lutheran theology, Concordia is publishing a number of Sasse’s essays
in three volumes called We Confess. Each volume covers a different
theme. Volume 1 is on Jesus Christ; Volume 2 is about the sacraments;
Volume 8 discusses the church.
Included in this book, Volume 8, are
Jesus Intercedes for His Church
On the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit
Article VII of the Augsburg Confession in the Present Crisis of Lu-
theranism
Ministry and Congregation
Apostolic Succession
Last Things: Church and Antichrist
The Church Lives!

The first and last of these are sermons that were delivered in Germany
during WWII. “On the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit” assures us that He
continues to build the church in spite of wars and persecutions. The
essay on Article VII of the Augsburg Confession points out that this
great article on the unity of the church is strongly confessional and by
no means advocates a “lowest common denominator” theology. “Min-
istry and Congregation” deals with the difficult question of how much
authority each of these should have—a topic under much discussion
today. Some have tried to bolster the church by fostering the idea of
Apostolic Succession, but Sasse shows that this is a false and dangerous
notion. In “Last Things: Church and Antichrist” Sasse discusses the
mystery of the Antichrist.

TOMMTT TTT TTTO

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