Staying Until We Are Kicked Out?

B. Every believer for the sake of his salvation must flee all false teachers and avoid all heterodox congregations or sects.

Many, on hearing that the church exists wherever the Word and the sacraments are still found essentially, infer from this fact that it is a matter of indifference whether they belong to an orthodox [rechtglaeube] or to an unorthodox [falschglaeube] church, since after all they are in the church and so can be saved. But they are mistaken. True, it is not necessary to leave a heterodox communion in order to be in the church, and many are indeed saved who, for lack of knowledge, outwardly belong to sects and nevertheless continue in the [true] faith. But what does it profit anyone to be in the church if he is not of the church and [so] does not belong to it? Whoever has learned to know the false doctrine of the sects and their teachers and despite this fact continues to belong to them is indeed still in the church but not of the church. Such a person does not belong to the divine seed that is hidden in the sects. His communion with the sects is not a sin of weakness, with which the state of grace can exist, for such a person acts willfully and contrary to the will of God, who in His holy Word commands us to flee and avoid false teachers and their false worship.

As little, therefore, as the doctrine that true [begnadigte] Christians still commit sins of weakness justifies those who think that for that reason they knowingly and willfully may continue in sin, indeed, as surely as those who thus sin against [divine] grace are children of perdition, so little also does the doctrine that in the sects there are children of God justify those who contrary to God's Word knowingly desire to continue in them; indeed, so surely also such willful partakers of the perversion of the Word of truth are children of perdition...

[p.114 C.F.W. Walther. Church and Ministry (Kirche und Amt) trans. J.T. Mueller (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1987]

Adiaphora Used Catechetically and Reverently

...if the real governance of the church means tending her faithfully with Christ's Gospel and sacraments, then the confessing and confessional church cannot be quite as indifferent to the outward forms in which this happens, as much glib modern talk about "culture" would suggest. It goes without saying that there is a genuine area of adiaphora (FC X). In an age, however, in which even physical science generally thinks of its observations or data as "theory-laden," rather than as rigidly "raw" or objective, churches should not be surprised if at least some apparent adiaphora turn out on closer inspection to be "theology-laden." One need not adopt MacLuhan's jingle about the medium being the message, to realize that how something is said is a not insignificant part of what in fact is said.

The founders of the Missouri Synod did not take this matter lightly. By constitutional provision they made it the "business of Synod," in part, "10. To strive after the greatest possible uniformity in ceremonies." This was not mean in the sense that how things are done does not matter, so long as they are done uniformly. The stated theological intent rather was to "purify" American Lutheranism of "the emptiness and the poverty in the externals of the service" taken over from "the false spirit of the Reformed."

[p.216-217, Kurt E. Marquart - The Church and Her Fellowship, Ministry and Governance: Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics Volume IX.]

Ecclesiastical Supervisors or Scarecrows?

Although the synodical structure and organization is as such an adiaphoron, "everything is permissible, but not everything is edifying" (I Cor. 10:23). If the pure preaching of the Gospel (not just in books or constitutions but in ongoing public proclamation, also by missionaries at large at home and abroad) and the right administration of the sacraments (in living, missionary, confessionally responsible congregations) are truly to be served, then clear constraints must apply. A synod dare not dissipate its energies on a cafeteria of heterogenous "objectives," as if all were of equal importance. That way lies the slide into the pragmatism of "conducting large enterprises."

Rather, an orthodox synod's "first and chief duty is to be confessional faithful in word and deed." [C.F.W. Walther, 1879 LCMS Iowa District Proceedings, 9] "To stand guard over the purity and unity of doctrine within the synodical circle, and to oppose false doctrine," was therefore the very first duty and responsibility of the Missouri Synod in its original constitution. In any real or potential conflicts of interests, the evangelical truth must have right of way. Whatever else a synod is able to do is fine and good, but this must have top and overriding priority, for "the church's who life and being consists in the Word of God (tota vita et substantia ecclesiae est in verbo Dei)... Mt. 4:4." [Luther against Ambrose Catharinus, 1521, WA 7:721] The only thing more urgent than the preservation of the purity and unity of evangelical doctrine is its restoration where it has been lost.

This means in practice that the synodical structure and its officials must come to the aid and support of faithful pastors and/or congregations when they are threatened by false doctrine or are oppressed or persecuted for the sake of the truth. Such protection of churches and ministers with the Word of God is the chief function of bishops. Today as in Luther's day it is widely thought "that the office of bishop implies dignity and that he is a bishop who wears a miter on his head." Not so. "It is not a position that implies dignity. No, it is an office requiring that the incumbent must take care of us, watch over us, and be our guardian." [Luther, Commentary on I Peter (1523, LW 30:135-136; WA 12:389-390] Furthermore: "Now today one finds many people who can let the Gospel be preached, provided that one does not cry out against the wolves and preach against the prelates." But it is not enough to feed the sheep, without fighting off the wolf. In fact, the "wolf can surely let the sheep have good pasturage. The fatter they are, the more he likes them." The one thing he cannot stand is "the hostile barking of the dogs." Hence the name of the Missouri Synod's first theological journal: Lehre und Wehre (doctrine and defense. See also FC SD RN.14). Historically the episcopate has, as a body, often fallen behind the rank and file, both pastors and people, on this score.

[p.214-216, Kurt E. Marquart - The Church and Her Fellowship, Ministry and Governance: Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics Volume IX.]

"I'm the Bylaw Man?"

[Marquart quoting Pieper]:

"...The fact that the sects put so much stock in external forms [of government] is due to the fact that they do not maintain the distinction between Law and Gospel." The whole point of the Synodical arrangements, Pieper wrote in his later essay on church government, is to implement, not to supplement the Word of God:

Therefore also we elect as Visitors and Presidents not people who are perhaps clever with documents or are better versed than others in our "Synodical Handbook," but people who are well experienced in God's Word and are better able than others clearly to present and apply it with reference to existing circumstances. The supervising offices established by our Synodical order are not to supplement God's Word, but serve God's Word, so that it -- God's Word -- might hold sway.[F. Pieper, "Kirche und Kirchenregiment" (Church and Church Governance), 1896 LCMS Proceedings, 40-41.]

State-church juridicalism, however, is not the only force that can violate the church's evangelical constitution. The present cultural threat is embodied rather in the corporate model of the commercial world, with its bureaucratic controls and empire building.

Sasse's complaints of the "modern over-organization of the church" and "the church politics with which modern bishops kill their own time and that of others," though first uttered in the European context, apply wherever the temptation is to have a "central bureaucracy running things not by the Word but by force (non verbo, sed vi)." [Sasse, We Confess the Church, p.82]

The trend in American churches has been "to think of the Church as a kind of business corporation chartered to do the Lord's work," which entails "the subordination of questions of truth" to "efficiency of operation," in the manner of pragmatism. In the interests of "maintaining outward unity and efficiently conducting large enterprises," there occurred a "simultaneously increasing administrative centralization and decreasing theological centralization." This "pragmatic conception of the Church" substituted "broad church inclusion of opposing theological views for theological answers to them." Thus "the Church's theology has been living in a modest colnial house, more and more overshadowed by the skyscraper of the Church's active work." [L.A. Loetscher, The Broadening Church, 8, 59, 93]

These are the directions in which churches will inevitably drift if left to the buffetings of current cultural winds of doctrine (Eph. 4:14). The solution is not a fearful abdication in the face of modern challenges, but a conscious and clear-headed subjection of everything to the paramountcy of the evangelical truth. A church that "cuts corners" with the truth for the sake of popularity and statical expansion must in the end disintegrate. The militant church on earth is a confessing and a confessional church. "The proper form of the historical church therefore is the confessing church, which in single-mindedness and enduring faithfulness preserves and propagates the saving truth in the power of the Holy Spirit."

[p.213-214, Kurt E. Marquart - The Church and Her Fellowship, Ministry and Governance: Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics Volume IX.]

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Democracy, Doctrine, Heresy, and Fellowship

The question of voting in the church is most conveniently addressed at this point. In the temporal sphere , given democratic arrangements, to vote is to take part in and to exercise the awesome powers of Rom. 13:1ff. Voting is an act of supreme sovereignty, which can, within constitutionally specified limits, enforce the majority will with the ultimate sanctions of the death penalty and war. Voting can mean nothing like this in the church at all (Mt. 20:24-28). The church is not a democracy but a Christocracy: Christ alone is Lord. Voting is but a way of expressing agreement or consensus. Two cases are possible: (1) If the matter is clearly settled in God's Word, then voting does not establish the truth of it, but merely expresses confession or denial of that Word. Such a vote should never be undertaken lightly, but only after thorough discussion and painstaking efforts to clear up misunderstandings, since division here is fraught with weighty consequences. [FOOTENOTE 36 - SEE BELOW] (2) If the question is not clearly settled in God's Word, then it must be decided in love on the basis of such facts and arguments as can be brought to bear on the matter. As a matter of common sense, the minority should accede to the wishes of the majority here, but the latter have no inherent right to impose anything on the others. And if consider for weak consciences for instance demands it, the majority must forgo its wishes and yield to the minority in love.

So little room is there in the church for a secular majority rule, that Walther writes: "Should it happen that something were decided or determined by the congregation contrary to God's Word, then such a decision and determination is null and void, is also to be so declared, and to be revoked." In the church, neither majorities nor minorities rule, but only faith and love. Faith is governed solely by God's Word. Therefore faith does not yield to love, but love yields to faith. Everything else yields to love.

The same principles of government by faith and love apply equally to local or "simple" churches, and to "composite" church-bodies.

[p.207-209 Kurt E. Marquart - The Church and Her Fellowship, Ministry and Governance: Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics Volume IX.]

FOOTNOTE
[Marquart's Footnote 36] C.F.W. Walther: "Matters of doctrine and conscience are to be resolved unanimously according to God's Word and the Confession of the church (Is. 8:20...) ...Hence a congregation which wants to be Christian, more particularly Evangelical Lutheran, cannot presume to determine by vote [whether] something that has already been decided by God's Word and the Confessions of the church should be regarded by it as valid or be rejected by it. As soon as a congregation refused to acknowledge the decisive standard of the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, it ceases to be Lutheran; and when it no longer is willing to subject itself to the clear declarations of Holy Scripture as the Word of the eternal God, it becomes a synagog of Satan (Rev. 3:9)" (The Form of A Christian Congregation, 56-58). When a stand had to be taken, at the 1881 LCMS Convention, for or against the biblical, confessional doctrine of the Election of grace, as formulated in Walther's 13 Theses, it was carefully explained that a vote could never determine truth or falsehood. The vote, rather, was to make clear "who belongs to us and who not," and whether "there are only a small number of those who reject the doctrine taught in our publications, and who will then have to leave our house, or whether we, who confess the true doctrine of Election, are in the minority and must therefore leave our present synodical home" (1881 LCMS Procedings, 32).

Winning Votes Isn't the Answer or the Authority

It is natural and wholly commendable therefore that having lost "the magistrate" as a basic organizing principle, the immigrant Lutherans relied on the fullest possible lay participation, activity, and responsibility. This stress on the priestly dignity of the People of God had nothing to do with populist democratism. A priest is to tend to his priestly service, as prescribed by God, and is not free to "do as he likes." A "majority decision" here is not necessarily right or even valid. C.F.W. Walther, who is sometimes blamed--wrongly, as we shall see--for subjecting church and ministry to a secular, democratic "majority rule," held nothing of the kind. Walther taught, for example, that if a congregation were to exclude the existing ministers of the Word in its midst from their rightful part in calling other ministers, such "calls" would be invalid.

[p.148 Kurt E. Marquart - The Church and Her Fellowship, Ministry and Governance: Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics Volume IX.]