Yeah.
Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Corey J.
Mahler. And I'm Wo.
Today
on Stone Choir, Corey and I are going to be talking about
why we are Lutheran.
Uh this is kind of a midpoint and an arc of discussions
that have been going on for months now and there's been a
lot of p controversy recently about small catech or the large catechism
this week.
Uh there have been controversies about communion, uh about girls teaching in
the church.
And we are frequently some of the first voices speaking up about
those issues inside Lutheranism.
And so a number of people have asked or said, you know,
either asked, so why are you Lutheran?
When are you leaving?
Or just said you need to join us or you need to
go somewhere else or you stupid Lutherans, you never should have stopped
being Roman Catholic in the first place.
So we want to take this opportunity to kind of step back
from the the noise and the arguments and make the positive case
for why we care about the doctrine that we hold and why
we're members of the churches that we are.
Uh it's it's a fair question, you know, Lutheranism is is a
small thing today.
Uh it's there are historical reasons for that and there are theological
reasons. But I I would hope that someone who's listening to us
would recognize that being the largest and the most popular, particularly when
you're talking about something that vitally connects to truth, doesn't necessarily mean
that it's right.
And in fact it may well be that the biggest, most popular
thing is crappy.
You know, small, amazing restaurants have better, healthier food than McDonald's.
And sometimes they don't even cost that much more.
So being big and popular doesn't mean you're right, and being small
and unpopular doesn't mean you're wrong.
The blessing that Christians have is that we have been given by
God a standard of determining what is true and what is false
doctrine, and that is scripture.
And so we've talked a bit in the past about the history
of Lutheranism.
We're not going to talk about that today.
Uh, we're not going to talk too much about specific doctrines, but
we're going to show a couple just as examples of contrast between
the way Lutherans speak about certain things and approach certain topics uh
in contrast to other Protestants.
Uh we're not really going to address the pre-Reformation sects because frankly
Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Orthodoxy pretty much flatly reject scripture as
something that rules over all.
They don't they they'll pay lip surface to things that sound Christian
to us, to Protestants, but when push comes to shove they will
always have something that they can use against scripture.
And so
uh
I
don't I think there's so little common ground there that it's more
important for us to speak within the post-Reformation family of of denominations,
why are we the way that we are briefly and to begin
with why Corey and I are misery sinned Lutherans.
So Corey, I'll start with you.
Since you were a m more recent convert, you can tell folks
how you became Lutheran and and what it what it means to
you. I think
I'll start off with the same wording that I used in a
letter that I sent to President Harrison about another issue that was
what was that
year before last last year?
At any rate, I am and I am not a cradle Lutheran,
and what I mean by that is that I did grow up
in a Lutheran school.
I went to an LCMS school from preschool through eighth grade.
I did not go in high school because there are no LCMS
high schools where I was in California, at least at the time,
I think there is one now.
But
I am not a cradle Lutheran because my parents were not Lutheran,
still are not Lutheran.
And so I grew up in a non denominational church, a series
of a few churches actually, although mostly one particular church.
And so my background was the general non-denominational, vaguely Baptist Christianity
that most Christians in the US are.
And I came back to Lutheranism because obviously, growing up in an
LCMS school, I had a small catechism, I read the small catechism,
I memorized the small catechism, but I came back to Lutheranism because
I started to take my faith more seriously in undergrad and then
read. Really at the end of and after law school.
And so that would have been 2012 is when I passed the
bar, so about a decade ago.
But as part of taking things more seriously, I started reading a
lot. And not just Lutheran, but also Reformed.
Some Roman Catholic, although less of that, because I did have a
fairly firm understanding of why the Reformation had happened and why Protestants
do not agree with Roman doctrine.
But I had to look into the various Protestant traditions because I
had never really paid that much attention to them.
I had paid attention to politics and philosophy and psychology and various
other fields.
I'd spent very little time in religion proper, except in so far
as it touches on philosophy.
And so I started reading those materials.
And I started with the reformed materials.
I spent a lot of time reading the various confessions, listening to
arguments from the Reformed Position, for the Reformed Position, and
then I ordered some Lutheran materials.
I ordered the sort of the starter kit from CPH after I
had started reading online in the Book of Concord, which is how
I first started seeing the Book of Concord website, that I eventually
would rework and put up the new version of that.
But I ordered the starter set as it were from CPH and
read through that.
It's a I don't know, three foot stack of books or something,
two foot, whatever it is, it's a lot of books.
And then I started ordering Luther's volumes and reading these materials and
as so many people have found, if you start reading the Lutheran
materials, you find that you've been Lutheran all along.
Or at least you find that Lutheranism is what agrees with what
you see in scripture, because Lutheran materials are constantly
going back to Scripture, to the wording of Scripture, as it is
in Scripture, as it is meant to be understood in Scripture.
And if you are the kind of person I wasn't incidentally, I
am usually somewhat argumentative.
In this case I wasn't really combative or argumentative.
I looked at the materials, assessed them, and came to the conclusion
that Lutheran positions are correct because they agree with God's word but
there are those who will argue against Luther.
I have spoken with several men who said that they started off
reading Luther because they wanted to prove Luther wrong, or they wanted
to see how Luther was wrong, and they said they lost the
argument. Because Luther uses God's word constantly, and so you will eventually
lose the argument with Luther because he is just going to beat
you over the head with scripture, which is a good thing in
this case.
And so that's essentially how I came to be a Lutheran.
Obviously, from there I found an LCMS church and started attending the
church and was finally confirmed, which I had not been earlier in
life. And so that's essentially how I became a Lutheran.
Then I moved across the country and part of another Lutheran church,
still LCMS, just another church in the Synod.
But that is essentially
how I came back to Lutheranism in the last decade or so.
And you were
lucky in both places that you've lived that after reading what the
Lutheran fathers wrote about scripture and about doctrine, you were able to
find churches that were actually consistent with that, because that's not a
given. And that's something that we'll be talking about in the last
part of this episode about why why we first we're starting with
why we are Lutheran, how we became Lutheran, and then why we're
remaining Lutheran and finally what it is that we are fighting for.
Why, you know, again briefly, why do we start this podcast?
Why are we involved in these discussions, in these fights, frankly online,
why are why are Christians fighting?
That sounds like it's an oxymoron Christians shouldn't fight.
I mean that's just it's not nice.
So we're going to make an account for why we are engaged
in the fights that we are and why so we're beginning with
where we're coming from so you can understand that as Corey said,
like he's normally argumentative.
Like that's I think anyone who knows anything about you knows that's
true. And yet you're not argumentative for the sake of just picking
fights. You want to find clarity and truth.
And usually that means picking apart bad arguments.
And when confronted with a good argument, you're content.
that's what an honest man does when he's confronted with the truth.
You stop fighting and you stop struggling.
And uh you made a very good point that I want to
reiterate. It's something I think we've mentioned before, but I have also
heard it numerous times where people who were raised in other denominations
will begin reading Lutheran doctrine or talking to Lutherans and asking us,
so what do you believe about X, Y, and Z?
And we will say we believe this.
And in the middle part, we're going to get to a few
places where most people, most Protestants disagree with Lutherans, and we're going
to talk about why that is.
But apart from a couple categories that are very important categories, but
apart from those few carve-outs, for the most part, Protestants pretty well
agree with most, if not virtually all things the Lutherans believe, because
we're all working from the same book.
And the good thing that has still been preserved in what is
called evangelical Protestantism is a belief that scripture is is inerrant.
It's actually the word of God.
And as such, we can trust it.
And so anyone, regardless of denomination, regardless of pastor, if he's submerged
in the word, if he's reading and understanding, and if he's uh
reluctant to use the word opening his heart and mind, but really
what else do you call it?
When God is speaking to you and you receive it, the Holy
Spirit will convict your conscience of the truth.
And so I have also heard numerous men say
after reading or having Lutheran doctrine described, well that's what I believe.
And this these are these are people who have been taught the
opposite. So we will describe what Lutherans teach about something.
Someone who is from a a very far-flung Protestant denomination will say,
Well, yeah, that's what I believe.
And I know for a fact that that's not what's taught in
their seminaries, and Wayne may well not be taught by their pastors.
Now, in some cases, you know, pastors are they're human beings too.
So maybe the pastors have sort of taken the same approach that
they have, that they were taught one thing, but then scripture convicted
their consciences of something else and as they look at these issues
they will agree with God.
And so when Cory and I make the case for Lutheranism, it's
never because it is some special version of Christianity.
And this is a tricky thing to say because pretty much everyone
makes the same claim and I think it's important to acknowledge that
and it's ignor important to acknowledge that at most one of us
is right Only one denomination can possibly be telling the truth that
we're saying things that have always been believed.
Now maybe nobody's right, and everyone believes that's wrong, but at most
one of us is right.
So it's not confrontational for us to say
we believe that these beliefs are the historic beliefs of the church
long before there was something called Rome or certainly long before there
was a Reformation and you had things called denominations that were different
than effectively
uh dioceses in various geographies.
Uh for my own part, I was um effectively a cradle Lutheran.
Uh I was baptized as a toddler, not as an infant.
My mom who came from the south somehow ended up attending um
an LCA church uh prior to the uh formation of Elka.
I'm not sure how because as a southerner I don't think there
are any Lutheran's where she was from, but for some reason she
had started attending that church and
when my parents had me, uh they she in particular wanted to
get me baptized, and so my dad, who was a laps Baptist,
became Lutheran basically to because he felt that it was it was
his duty to his family.
And one of the things that forced that issue for him was
that when the pastor gave him the oath that he would take
as a father and you know, as a is the father of
the baptized baby, uh included raising the child in the church, etcetera.
And so he took that oath seriously and committed fully to going
back to church and to being Lutheran.
And as he got more engaged, he quickly realized, again, this was
this was before Elka was formed, but he realized even then that
the LCA was in dire straits.
And so as he looked at again, you know, the Lutheran confessions
and Lutheran doctrine and what he knew from scripture has having been
raised Baptist, he's like, This is not a good church.
This is it's it's in bad shape.
And so he learned some things from his first pastor and then
the second pastor we had was a universalist and that was the
very quickly the last straw.
And thankfully there was a Missouri Siddharth congregation that was also local
who had a wonderful pastor, just an amazing man.
I can I can still hear his voice to this day.
he was just a very gifted preacher and a just a a
a a rare treasure in the church.
And he I believe he gave my dad his first book of
Concord and encouraged him to become engaged in the faith more.
And when my dad read the Book of Concord, he had exactly
the same response as Corey.
This is what I believe.
Again, even though he was raised Baptist, you know, he probably had
to work through some of the sacramental stuff.
But when he saw what Luther said, he's like, Yeah, that's I
believe this because I believe scripture.
And so
I mentioned that as my story because I am his son.
And so that is my inheritance.
I was baptized as a as a toddler.
You know, I was thinking 18 months, twenty months old, something like
that. And that's when I became Lutheran.
And I've been Lutheran ever since.
And from
sixth through twelfth grade, I attended Missouri Synod schools.
Uh I had the privilege actually of being taught in sixth grade
by uh Paul McCain Senior's mother.
Uh I don't even know her m first name.
Her name was Mrs.
McCain. I remember her 'cause she was by far the best teacher
I ever had.
She was an amazing lady.
And whatever good I do with English today, I literally learned in
sixth grade from her.
She was an incredible woman.
And that was an incredibly good school.
There's some fantastically good Lutheran schools.
And there are also some really crappy ones.
Uh the school that I attended from tenth through twelfth grade was
pretty much garbage.
I I could have just stayed at home and read books and
been far better off.
But I'm still thankful to have had that experience because it kept
me out of the public schools, which were even then in incredibly
dire shape.
So I was raised
Lutheran, I was inculcated, I was catechized, I was trained properly, and
I never really took it seriously.
Um, one of the things that Lutherans are very good at is
emphasizing
God's work in our lives and God's gifts to us.
And we particularly emphasize infant baptism whenever you're baptized, but especially if
you're baptized if it is an infant, it makes very clear that
God has given you faith and it's not you doing stuff.
And while that is valuable from a soteriological view, I think that
it's one of the reasons that we have so many people falling
away today because there's really no and then taught to Lutheran children.
You know, confirmation is basically graduation from the church for a lot
of people.
It's a disaster.
You get confirmed, you have your first communion, and a lot of
them just never come back, or they fall away pretty quickly.
And they don't feel like they're missing anything.
And I honestly believe that part of the reason for that is
that because Lutherans are so good about correctly emphasizing the gifts that
God gives us in baptism and in communion and in the Word
that
we think well if it's all about Jesus and it's all Jesus
doing stuff, I don't have to do anything, which is completely false
doctrine. You don't have to do anything to be saved.
God took care of that.
But now that you are saved, the Christian life has a tenor
and it has a certain look to it, and there are things
that you have to do as a Christian.
Scripture's clear about that on every page.
There are things that Christians have to do, not for their salvation,
but because they're Christian.
It's like me telling you you have to breathe.
You know, most of the time you don't think about it because
it's an autonomic function, but if you stop breathing, somebody needs to
make you start breathing again or you're gonna die.
So as James, the epistle of James makes clear, when we on
this podcast say something that's not quite alien to what Lutherans talk
about, but it's something that's sorely neglected, when you live as a
Christian, that's like you living as a human being and breathing.
Once you're human, you've got to keep breathing.
Your heart's gotta keep beating.
Once you're Christian, you have to keep doing Christian things or you
stop being Christian.
And it's not God's fault that you stop being Christian, it's because
of your own apathy.
And our churches are shrinking in most cases because of the apathy
of the people in the pews.
The boomers failed to impress upon their children as, you know, was
in some ways failed to impress upon me, not by my own
parents, but by sort of the general experience of of the church
life and the school life is that well, you know, God's God's
taking care of everything.
We just we go to church, we give thanks to God, and
everything is in his hands.
And that leaves out the other hundred and sixty seven hours of
the week that leaves out the rest of the Christian life.
And so
my faith was always there.
I've I've I've been a Christian every day since I was baptized,
but there were years where I was a a crappy Christian.
I I was lazy, I was indifferent.
Uh there was a period of time where I I didn't come
to church because I had moved somewhere where I I assumed that
all the churches were bad and rather than actually checking one out,
I just said, Well, I might be disgusted if I go, so
I'm I'm just not gonna go.
I'm still Christian.
I'm still baptized.
Which is evil.
It was a horrible, terrible thing to do.
And I deprived myself of a period of time where I should
have been in the Word and receiving receiving God's blessings and living
a Christian life.
And I failed to do that.
And I did so willingly and callously and I did so in
complete indifference.
Well, it wasn't open rebellion, consciously on my part.
It was just eh, whatever.
I'm I know I'm Christian.
what do I need that for?
And what happened to me is I've I mentioned, you know, uh
once or twice before on this podcast, four or five years ago
I started realizing as I was talking about politics on Twitter mainly
and talking to friends privately, I was realizing that m mainly through
their observations, in most cases I was talking to non Christians or
people from other denominations, you know, didn't have any similar background to
mine. I realized when we were talking about politics that we were
actually talking about a spiritual war.
And the more I tried to understand into my own mind what
was going on in the world, the more I realized that this
wasn't political at all, this was spiritual.
And that is what pushed me back into, for the first time
my whole life, actively engaging in scripture and being and being involved
in church and doing what I should have been doing all along,
which was sharing my faith, investing time and energy and focus in
my faith, and making sure that as I was looking at the
world, I was doing it as a Christian and not just someone
who'd been baptized Christian and then kind of went on with his
life. And so
it's interesting that when I started doing that, I I I can
clearly remember there were a couple times where I was having a
conversation with someone, they would ask a question, and I would fire
off a thread, you know, a thousand-word essay that had some significant
theological theological contact in it, and I would look back and read
and think, wow, that was really good.
Where did that come from?
You know, and it wasn't it wasn't automatic writing, it wasn't some
sort of inspiration.
It was just what I'd been taught.
It was things that I'd been taught and I believed, but I
forgot about because I stopped caring.
And once I frankly looked at the world through the eyes of
of an unbeliever who was saying, What's going on?
What is this evil?
I was able to answer that question.
And that's when for the first time in my life, I actually
actively took seriously that the gift of Lutheran education and Lutheran doctrine
is not just about Sunday.
It's about everything in our lives and it's about the whole world.
It's about being able to look at these things and approach them
faithfully without fear and without confusion.
And once I realized that that was something that was missing very
much from the conversation, I simply had no choice but to begin
to talk to people and to share.
And ultimately it ended up with Corey and I beginning this podcast.
I also had a period of time in undergrad where I certainly
did not take my faith as seriously as I should have and
didn't really attend church.
I did not bother to find a church when I was in
undergrad in Michigan, in large part because I had been attending a
not quite Baptist but non denominational church where they just didn't really
stress the importance of any of this really, because there's such a
light touch when it comes to doctrine or theology in so many
American churches that
for many children who grow up in that environment, it doesn't seem
like an important part of their life.
It's just something they did with their parents on Sunday morning.
And that was it.
Because how many people who attend those churches are praying with their
children every night or having a Bible study.
Some of them will pray with their children, but are you s
are you studying the Bible with your children?
Are you instructing your children?
Are you teaching them?
I at least had the advantage of attending an LCMS school, so
I had the catechism, I had memorized that, which is undoubtedly part
of what brought me back to the Lutheran Church, and undoubtedly part
of what kept me a Christian when I wasn't acting as a
Christian, certainly, because I had that instruction, train up a child in
the way he should go, and when he is old he will
not depart from it.
That is obedience to scripture.
That is what Lutherans do.
That is the Lutheran way, and I just did not have that.
So I had sort of a a conflicting set there because I
had on the one hand the Lutheran upbringing and on the other
hand the non denominational.
So I had a s a seriousness about the faith and an
unseriousness, and for a while the latter won out.
Thankfully, and thanks be to God, I have come back to the
church and was staunch Christian, but undoubtedly, as I said before, that
is in large part due to the fact
that I was brought up correctly in a Lutheran school.
And
it was exactly the same thing with me.
The thing that I was quoting was the large catech or the
small catechism.
I started belting out part after part that I had memorized as
a seventh grader and it was all sitting there and I believed
it and I'd internalized it and I never rejected it.
I just didn't treasure it.
I didn't I didn't think that it had any explanatory power for
anything other than passing the test to get or uh uh to
be admitted to communion.
And so I think that's something that we don't do right.
I think that we rather than treating it as as a full
indoctrination into the full rich life of the church, it's treated as
a graduation where you go on to something else.
And that's obviously it's not how it's couched, but that's clearly that's
functionally what's happening.
And
we know from the demographics today that a lot of kids now
don't even make it to confirmation.
You know, they get baptized and then their their parents just wander
off for whatever reason.
And, you know, we're talking about uh Gen X and Millennial and
eventually we'll be talking about Zoomer parents who were going through that
cycle. And I'm thankful that as you and I engage with young
men, particularly on the internet, who see the problems with the evil
in the world, everyone recognizes that
we have to go back.
Yeah, we talked about I think a couple weeks ago about
whether or not it's possible to go back, whether or not, you
know, nostalgia is a good thing.
But doctrinally and lifestyle-wise, yes, it's absolutely vital to go back because
a hundred and fifty years ago there were big families and churches
were growing, and today neither of those is true, and that's not
a coincidence.
And one of the things that changed, the salient thing that changed
is that we stop obeying God in so many ways.
And obedience to God derives God's gifts.
And disobedience to God derives his wrath.
And usually the wrath is not disconnected.
It's not it's not that, oh well, you stop going to church
and you get hit by lightning.
It's that you stop going to church and you stop having the
comfort and the feeding of your soul and the nourishing of your
faith that keeps you ready for when hard times come.
the thing that everyone doesn't really think through is that and this
was present in the in the recent argument about about the large
cataclysm. You can make mistakes for a little while and just be
fine. Just like if, you know, you're a human being, you know,
you're you're average height, average weight, you have an aver average amount
of blood in your body.
You can lose ten percent of your blood and you'll still be
fine. You might be a little weak.
You know, it's something you probably should get looked at, especially if
it all comes out at once.
But you can handle it.
And spiritually things work the way the same way.
God gives us slack in the system so that the first time
you make a mistake, you don't just fall over dead, either physically
or spiritually, but you will eventually exhaust all of the slack.
And I think that as every Christian, we we need to focus
on the fact that we can't let there be slack in the
system. We can't let false doctrine and false teachers and false ideas
become ours because the one thing that you believe that's wrong, it's
not gonna damn you, but it opens the door for the next
wrong thing that you're gonna believe and the next wrong thing.
And the more of those things that you believe, it's not simply
that there's an accretion of errors.
It's not that you're having higher bitrate errors.
It's that suddenly the errors get a lot bigger.
You know, it's like if you've ever seen you know a an
L C D display die, you know, maybe you get one stuck
pixel. You're like, okay, that's fine.
You know, that's that's one piece of false doctrine.
I got that, but you know, I can still use the thing.
And then suddenly a small chunk of the screen dies.
And the next thing you know, a huge stripe, like a third
of the screen is dead.
And suddenly you can't use the display anymore.
The same thing happens when we start bashing and breaking our own
doctrine and our own hearts, your soul will eventually be beaten to
the point that there's not enough of what God promised left for
you that you're going to cling to it.
You're going to start clinging to the false pieces.
And so that is why as Lutherans we're adamant about pure doctrine,
about getting doctrine right.
It's not it's not about winning an argument with different denominations over
who has a Who has a better interpretation of the Bible, who
has a better read on the Bible?
The question is who is not calling God a liar?
And that's fundamentally the question underlying every doctrinal dispute.
God has said one thing in scripture, people say either the same
thing or they say something else.
And when you say the same thing as God, you are confessing.
When you say something else, you're violating the first and second commandments
because you're saying, you know, you might be my creator, but you're
not my God anymore.
I have a better idea.
I can be a better God than you on this one.
And I'm going to say something that you said I'm going to
say something different than what you said, and I'm going to attribute
it to you.
And that's a violation of the second commandment, to take the Lord's
name in vain, to attribute doctrines to God which do not come
from God.
And that is a deeply pernicious error because it convicts consciences.
We see this all the time where
in our church and in other churches, there are pastors who are
nice men.
They're good men.
They intend to be honest.
They study.
They live good, wholesome lives.
You look at them on paper and you're like, yeah, that's that's
a good pastor.
I'm lucky to have him.
But there are two or three things that they teach that are
just flat out false doctrine.
They're plainly contrary to scripture.
And they can weasel around it.
You know, they don't think they're weaseling.
They think that they're being faithful, but they're being faithful to unfaithful
teaching. And the reason that we've spent so much time focusing on
pastors and teachers, which is synonymous largely, is that when a pastor
convicts your conscience that this is what God has said, you have
to believe it or you're disobeying God.
And as as Corey as you said, raising a man, raising a
child up as God wishes will result in faithfulness in his latter
life. The opposite is also true.
When you give someone in their youth or as they're developing false
teachings, if they cling to those, they're going to cling to them
in opposition to scripture.
And the disputes that occur among the various Protestant denominations today are
really rooted in that.
So the next thing that we're going to talk about is really
I think there's one clear distinction between Lutheranism and everyone else in
the post Reformation world that explains all the things that make people
really mad about what Lutherans believe.
So there we're gonna we're gonna talk about three symptoms, but they
all have the same cause.
The fundamental cause and in my view of why Lutherans sound and
focus in different ways in the other denominations is what the Santa
Dr. Nagel called who's doing the verbs.
You know, we talk a lot in in this podcast about polarity,
about who is doing what, what's the direction of the of the
speech in scripture.
So when Dr.
Nagel asks the question, who's doing the verbs, he's talking out, for
example, one that we've used before, Lazarus.
Lazarus was dead in the tomb.
Jesus came to the graveyard.
He was bereft, he spoke to him, he said, Lazarus, come out.
The naagal question is when you look at that scenario, who was
doing the verb when Jesus, the creator of all things speaks to
a corpse and says, Lazarus come out.
Did Lazarus obey?
Did Lazarus listen to Jesus and decide, Yeah, that's a good idea.
I'm going to get up and walk out of this tomb?
Or Or was he dead?
W was he a corpse that had begun to rot, because it
had been days?
Jesus did that.
Lazarus didn't do that.
Lazarus didn't rise from the dead.
Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.
So when we talk in Lutheran terms, we're talking in all of
these scenarios that we'll get into about who's actually doing it.
Because when Lutherans say one thing and all the other post Reformation
denominations say something else, that's where the fundamental disagreement is.
And they fall into three categories.
There's baptism, there's communion, and there's the liturgy, or what is called,
you know, sometimes the worship service.
And each of those, the question where Lutherans will come down on
one one side, and most denominations will come down on the other
side in one and possibly all three cases, is who's doing it?
And we're going to talk about that today.
We're not going to talk so much about the doctrines, but about
who's doing the verbs, because when you hear a Lutheran talk about
baptism, you hear something that's fundamentally at odds with the way Baptists
talk. And we talk right past each other and this is the
reason why because when a Baptist talks about baptism, a Baptist is
talk about talking about a person doing something for God that it's
not spiritual except as an expression.
There's nothing there except for obedience.
And as Lutherans, we look to scripture which says in some cases
that is true superficially, but even then it is because faith has
first been given.
And there are other cases that are clear in scripture with it
where it makes clear that the essence of baptism is that God
is actually doing it.
I think that Jesus' own baptism is the clearest example of this.
You have Jesus obeying by going into the water to be baptized
by John.
You have God the Father speaking in his own voice from a
cloud. They heard the voice of God speaking, saying, This is my
beloved son, in whom I am well pleased, and the Holy Spirit
visibly alighted as though a dove on Jesus.
Now the exact same thing happens at every single baptism that happened
in Jesus' baptism.
The only difference is that the Holy Spirit is not visible when
it is done for everyone else.
God was demonstrating in that one miraculous moment what is happening in
baptism? Jesus was putting the baptism into the water.
That's what was happening there.
It was a physical example, it was a physical manifestation of the
Trinity, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all in
the same place, all acting in their in particular ways according to
their persons.
And yet at the same time, every baptism is just like that.
You have You have the voice of God saying, I baptize you
in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit. Now, when Christians do it, it's a man speaking.
In the case of emergency, it could be anyone, but typically in
good order, it's a pastor who's baptizing.
He's saying the words that Math that Jesus gave to us in
Matthew twenty eight, which bookends Matthew three.
In Matthew three you have the Trinity physically present.
In Matthew twenty eight you have Jesus saying, Go therefore and baptize
all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit.
The voice of God is spoken in every baptism, not from a
cloud, but by the man who is obeying God by applying the
water, which is the visible sign of the invisible Holy Spirit.
So each baptism is a replay of that obedience.
But Baptists and some others will focus on the obedience part and
they'll not listen to the scriptural argument that God is doing everything.
Yes, you go into the water or the water is applied to
you, and a man says the words, and that is obedience to
God, but as as Corey's gonna mention talk in a minute, there's
no power in the in the water, it's just plain water.
The power is in the word which is given by God
to be applied with the water, that is what makes baptism efficacious.
It's the s it's the spoken word of God that does the
miracle. And the fact that there is a man or a child
or a woman or whomever Receiving the water and the fact that
they may have consented to it to use that term doesn't mean
that they're the one doing it.
God is doing the baptism just as he did it in the
first baptism with Jesus.
God does all of it, just as God did all of it
with Lazarus coming out of the tomb.
Lazarus obeyed, but it wasn't a conscious obedience.
It was it was inexorable.
The creator of the universe said, Lazarus come out, just as he
said, Let there be light, and there was, and it was.
When the creator speaks, it is true.
And that is also true in our baptisms.
So when Lutherans focus on baptism, this is what we're focusing on.
It is got on God's promise in the word given to us.
And for Christians to make that something that we're doing for God
doesn't rob it of its power because they're still actually doing the
form of what is given, but they're fundamentally denying the essence of
what's going on.
And that leads to some terrible errors that can have awful consequences.
And so the reason that Lutherans fight for this doctrine is that
failure to believe in God's promises can lead to despair.
The reality of baptism is one of the reasons that you will
see Lutherans very frequently reminding people of their baptism.
Because your baptism is when God marked you as his own.
If you are baptized as a child, that is probably when you
were given faith, you could have already had it from hearing the
word in utero, and I know that that will set some people's
hair on fire.
Well, if you don't believe that your God can give faith to
an in utero child, then you probably aren't worshiping the god of
the universe who can do whatever he wants.
And so you should probably be concerned about that thought.
But when it comes to baptism, we will often hear those who
disagree with the Lutheran position, which is typically Baptists on this case,
unsurprisingly, who will try to say, Oh well that's water baptism.
One you're denying the creeds, which says, I believe in one baptism
for the remission of sins, not two baptisms, not three baptisms, not
a water baptism, and a spirit baptism, no one baptism.
There's one baptism.
And they will try to say that, well, it's just water, and
water can't do that, and we agree.
Water cannot do that.
In fact, you're paraphrasing something from our catechism, from the large catechism,
because we pointed out this supposed objection and struck it down from
the large catechism I'll read a paragraph here.
Therefore I exhort you again that these two, the water and the
word by no means be separated from one another imparted, for if
the word is separated from it, the water is the same, as
that with which the servant cooks, and may indeed be called a
bathkeeper's baptism.
But when it is added, as God is ordained, it is a
sacrament, and is called Christ Baptism.
Let this be the first part regarding the essence and dignity of
the Holy Sacrament.
What is being said there is that the Sacrament is the water
and the word together.
If you have only one and not the other, you don't have
the sacrament.
If you're judg if you are just preaching the word, it's not
baptism. If you are just throwing water on someone, it's not baptism.
If you have the water and the words, in other words, if
you have it ends as instituted by Christ, you have baptism.
And that is the Lutheran position because that is a position of
Scripture. And we care about this issue so deeply because this is
something that brings great comfort to the Christian.
First off, of course, it is God's truth, and so we care
about it for that reason.
But practically, this is also of great benefit to the Christian.
This is you are God's own.
Remember your baptism.
God claimed you as his own.
Whatever the world wants to tell you, whatever Satan wants to tell
you, ignore it.
This is This is what matters.
You were baptized into the church.
You are a Christian.
And so we do not want to let people rob Christians of
that comfort by saying that it's, oh, well, it's not actually a
a sacrament.
That was just you declaring
your faith in God because that's nowhere in scripture.
Nowhere in scripture is baptism a declaration of faith.
That's not what it is.
Go read all of the times that baptism occurs in Scripture.
Look at who is doing what, and look at what is being
done. Look at what is not being done.
You may just find that scripture does not agree with the position
you hold, that scripture does not say what you may have thought
it says.
And the reason that it's important to point out that there are
good pastors who are teaching bad things is not to not to
belittle or to be mean to them, but but but to point
out that that is precisely when things can go the most awry.
When a good pastor who is loving and who takes care of
his flock and teaches something that is contrary to scripture, but explains
it in a way that if you don't think about it and
you don't really study it, you can go along with it.
When someone comes along and says the opposite, it creates a crisis
of faith.
It's like hitting a wall because suddenly the thing that you'd been
counting on, that you had been you thought you were obeying God
in good conscience with a clean conscience, when someone like a Lutheran
comes along and says, Actually, that is an evil thing that you've
been taught.
Again, when we talked about evil in a previous episode, evil is
that which is contrary to God's word and contrary to His will.
It doesn't need to be intentional to be contrary to God's word
and contrary to His will.
When someone says that baptism doesn't save you, that's evil because it
contradicts God.
And so
sometimes we we'll use language that is not is is more aggressive,
uh sometimes pejorative, but it's ultimately true.
To speak such a way is an evil act.
It doesn't mean that the person is fundamentally an evil person, but
the words coming out of their mouth are evil.
And this is this is understandable to anyone.
You can I I could sit here and spend five minutes saying
the most awful, terrible things about people.
That would be evil.
If they're if it's not true, if it's not my place to
speak, that would be an overt evil.
There's no doubt that evil things can come out of someone's mouth.
It's particularly dangerous when it's doctrine.
And as Corey, as you said, the doctrine of baptism in particular
is so comforting because it's something that's missing from most of the
rest of Protestant Christianity.
When Lutherans speak of your baptism, your baptism, when God put his
holy name on you personally, there were witnesses, there was water as
a physical means of delivering the promise.
All of that is it's a concrete touchstone in your life in
the past, just as the cross is a concrete touchstone in history,
it happened.
It literally happened.
We know almost to the day when it happened, certainly within a
a year or two.
We know that it happened.
They're witnesses to it.
We point back to the cross as the moment when Christ paid
for our sins.
Lutherans point to our baptism as a moment when we were sealed
as children of God.
Now, seal is a word that's used by different denominations in different
ways, but when God puts his name on you, he's claiming you
for his own.
There's we all know that there's there's demon possession and there's demon
oppression, where you know it's possible for a demon to be in
someone's house or in a place messing with them.
It's also possible for a demon to get inside someone.
And sometimes they stay there and they tear the people apart.
It's it was something that was common in the Old Testament.
It's something that's increasingly common today.
It's just that now we apply terms from the DSM for it
and say, well, that's that's a mental illness.
Demons are real and they can possess people.
Now, it's tricky to say this because I don't want to compare
the Holy Spirit to a demon, but when the Holy Spirit enters
you through faith through the Word, you are being possessed in a
sense by God.
The indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which is a phrase that I
think is common among a lot of Christians, what is that, if
not a positive form of possession?
It is the Holy Spirit, it is God Himself inside you, shaping
you, forming your heart, guiding your lips, marking your days according to
his will.
It's the opposite of evil, oppressive possession, but it's functionally very similar,
except that when a demon possesses, it's for destruction.
When the Holy Spirit dwells within you, it is for your sanctification.
It is you becoming increasingly more in accord with God's will by
engaging daily in his things in obedience to God.
And again, as we said many times, this is a post-soteriological concept.
We're not talking about how you get to heaven.
We're not talking about you doing something to earn your salvation.
You're already saved.
You were saved at the cross, you were saved at baptism, you're
saved because this Holy Spirit dwells within you.
And when He gives you the ability to understand the word as
it's spoken, you receive it with gladness.
That is also something that we can point to.
And baptism is so crucial because that is when we say for
certain that the Holy Spirit entered someone.
It's absolutely true that first and foremost, the Holy Spirit comes by
the Word.
There are many people who receive the gift of faith before they're
baptized. That does not change what baptism does.
You God is infinite.
So if God is already within you and then God comes within
you again through baptism, you already have as much God as God
has to give.
You don't need to worry about the math in these scenarios.
We get hung up with our rationalism about trying to plot things
on a timeline.
And trying to do the math on how much God and how
much sanctification and how much blessing we get, God pours out more
than we can possibly take.
He gives us everything that we need every day.
And that is the focus that we have.
And so when we talk about who is doing it, the reason
it's so important for Lutherans that God is doing baptism is that
on the day when your faith is threatened by something terrible happening
in your life, you're confronted with tragedy or loss or doubt of
some sort, and you don't know if you're Christian anymore.
You don't know if you've done enough, which is a ca is
a question that people often ask.
it's the wrong question, but it's a question that nevertheless gets asked
regularly. Someone who's been raised Lutheran or someone who believes Lutheran doctrine
doesn't worry am I God's child?
Because they know that God put his name on them.
That's an absolute and it's in the past.
It's a done deal.
And as long as you can look back and say, yes, I
am marked as a child of God, you remain a child of
God. The only way that you stop being a child of God
after that is if you say, I don't care, I don't want
that anymore.
And frankly, baptism is so important as a means of God's grace
in our lives that there are now Satanists who are openly doing
unbaptisms of people who are baptized as believers who wish to renounce
their faith and renounce their baptism and be unbaptized in reverse in
the name of Satan.
That's how much Satan cares about baptism.
He knows it's not an outward work.
He knows that it's the Holy Spirit coming to us through God's
word. And the fact that there are now people actually devoting time
and energy to overtly driving out the Holy Spirit in public as
a matter of confession.
it's not first order proof, but I think it's incredibly strong proof
that the Lutheran position on this is true, that the the action
of the man rejecting God, that is his that is his confession.
But God placing his name on you can only come from above.
And it is only disobedience that can separate us from what God
has given to us.
If you want to see how important baptism has been historically to
Christians, this may be a little more difficult for an American audience,
but certainly for anyone listening in Europe it should be easy.
Go find an old graveyard and walk through it and read the
headstones. Particularly if you are in a Lutheran graveyard, but others as
well, you will see the date of baptism on some of those
headstones, and some of them will literally just say Baptisatus sum or
Isbing Getauf, depending the language they chose, which is I am baptized.
Note that it is I am, not I was.
I am baptized.
That may be the only thing on the headstone.
Because that's the most important thing, because that is saying I am
a child of Christ.
I have his promises.
I received them in the way he promised to give them.
That was of such great comfort to our forefathers in the faith.
That may be the last thing they wrote
the last thing they wanted, the one thing they wanted other people
to know about them was I am baptized.
And so that is why we fight so hard over this issue
as Lutherans.
Because we recognize just how vitally important it is to get this
one right, because if you get it wrong, you will cause people
to despair.
Because this is something concrete that you can cling to when Satan
assails you.
Yes, you can turn to the word, yes, you can turn to
prayer, but having that concrete thing you can point to and say,
I know exactly when God claimed me as his own is incredibly
comforting. And to speak to the issue of those who try to
say, Well, I believe because I read the words, why do I
need baptism?
It's because God is super abundant in his grace.
It's the same reason we'll get into it soon enough, the same
reason we have the sacrament, communion
God is offering the forgiveness of sins, he is coming to you
in multiple ways because we constantly need
that reaffirmation, we need that
We need God to tell us again, you are forgiven, you are
my child, you are adopted into my family, because we still live
in this life and we are still assailed by sin, death, the
flesh, the world, the devil.
And so we constantly need the reminder to shore up our faith,
to keep us strong in the faith, to help us persevere to
the
end. And
you don't need to go to a European graveyard that, you know,
isn't a Lutheran church.
You can go into the catacombs and you can see first century
catacomb emplacements where infants were born, they were baptized, they died, and
it will list that they were baptized, and it's clear from the
dates that they lived in many cases less than a year.
This was the very first practice of the church.
It is demonstrably proven in time.
This is not something that Luther made up.
It's not something that Rome corrupted.
This was always the belief of the church.
And it was always the belief of the church because it's straight
from scripture.
The idea that we do baptism is the novelty.
That's the case with the beliefs about the sacrament and also the
beliefs about worship.
the idea that we're the ones doing the thing, that's new.
That's new theology.
It was never part of the church until later on corruption was
introduced, who would introduce corruption?
Who would introduce a corruption that would diminish baptism?
Maybe it's the same one who's setting up on baptism booths today.
Because to deny your baptism is only one step removed from being
unbaptized. If you say God didn't do anything, I did that, that's
despising God's gifts.
And that's why we care.
That's why Lutherans care, because when a good Christian, when a faithful
Christian will openly despise one of God's precious gifts with a clean
conscience, that's that's dangerous.
You know, if if
we see we see videos of vegan parents who raise their infants
as vegans and the the poor miserable little children look like they're
typhus survivors.
They're skeletonized because they were starved, because they were not given the
nutrition. You can look at that and you can say that's evil.
Sure they were feeding them, that they were feeding them things that
aren't really food suitable for humans, let alone for a growing child.
The same is true of God's other gifts.
If you refuse to baptize a child, you're refusing to give that
which God has given to them.
It is a denial of God's gift to the one to whom
God God entrusted to you.
God entrusted a child to you and said, Take care of this
child, let the little ones come unto me.
And the word that Jesus uses in that verse refers to toddlers,
to infants.
It's to the smallest children.
It's not to those of the age of accountability, which never existed.
The earliest church practice involving baptism essentially mirrored circumcision.
Baptism was was in some cases done on the eighth day.
The difference was that baptism was also available to girls.
But it was understood in the same way that this is something
that God has given to us.
Now, there's a typological connection.
Baptism is not simply a mirror or a repeat of circumcision.
It does something different.
So I don't want to open the door to say, well, see,
it's an outward sign.
Obedience to God is obedience the way Lazarus obeyed.
We're dead in our sins and our trespasses until God gives us
his gifts through his word.
And
just to get back to the first point that I wanted to
make with this whole section, God is the one doing it.
And so when Lutherans sound different than others, that's the reason why.
As Corey mentioned, the second doctrine we'll get to, we're not going
to spend as long on the sacrament, but it works the same
way. When Jesus was in the upper room and he said, Take
eat, this is my body, do this as often as you eat
and drink of it in remembrance of me.
If that's the only verse you read, you're gonna pick the remembrance
word and think, well, okay, it's a memorial meal.
That's it's just us hanging around thinking about Jesus having some food
and some wine or not wine, if you want to believe that
you can disobey that.
You have to ignore the other parts in scripture that also discuss
communion, because it's referred to in multiple places in multiple different ways,
not in conflicting ways, but fleshing out that which was given in
the upper room.
The upper room wasn't the whole of the teaching that God gave
to the church or to those present about communion.
He said other things, and the other things that he said make
clear that it is him giving us his body and blood for
the remission of sins.
And
when you look at the scenario of someone receiving communion, you see
the hand going out or the you know, the mouth being opened
and the person receiving and eating and drinking, and there's a whole
lot of doing by the person who's up at the communion rail.
It's easy to ignore what God is doing.
It's easy, just like in baptism, to say, well, you know, God
God promised something and maybe it's spiritual, but I'm I'm really the
doer here.
I'm the prime mover.
I'm going up, I'm obeying, I'm remembering, I'm, you know, I'm trying
to obey, but if you deprive God of being the first mover
in that scenario where he is the one bestowing his gifts, was
which are specifically his body and blood, which were again shed on
the cross, and to tie back to baptism, water also poured out
of Jesus' side.
That was a pericardial sac or surrounding his heart being pierced by
the Roman soldier's spear.
Water, blood, and the flesh of Christ were all present in the
moment of his death.
All of that is mirrored in the sacraments.
Now this isn't simply reminders.
This is these aren't simply mnemonics that we use to tie one
thing to another.
These typological connections are things that God makes clear in scripture to
reinforce over and over.
Here is what I am doing for you.
Because as Corey said, God gives us a superabundance of that which
is needed for our comfort.
It's not that if you don't have communion every Sunday, you're gonna
run up a surplus of sins and not be forgiven for them.
All of your sins were forgiven at the cross.
All of your sins were forgiven at baptism.
All of your sins are forgiven every time you receive absolution and
every time you receive communion faithfully.
God is giving us more than we need.
There's no math and salvation.
There's only God's perfect love for us.
And the sacraments and our view of the sacraments are bound up
in that in obedience to God.
Even in churches where they deny the reality of what baptism is,
and will say that it is their own declaration of faith when
they stand up there before the congregation.
They don't baptize themselves.
They are still being baptized
by a pastor who is acting in the stead of Christ.
So some of
the proper look of baptism, some of that typology is still there.
They may not realize the fullness of it, but it is still
present. And you mentioned typology, the verse over which we constantly
get into fights with Baptists and others is of course Peter three
twenty one, because it the most clearly states our view Baptism now
saves you.
A literal quote from scripture.
And
I have had baptists in conversations say that baptism does not save
you. I would think that would worry them because they are saying
the exact opposite of what Scripture says.
And I'll read the fullness of the verse because I want to
touch on one word that goes to typology that was just mentioned.
Baptism which corresponds to this now saves you, not as a removal
of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for
a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Now what is translated which corresponds to this is The underlying word
there is actually antitupos, antitype.
We're dealing here in typology.
And the verse, of course, not this verse, but the chapter goes
on to speak of the flood and other things.
Those are types of baptism.
Now, a type is something that prefigures, comes before, is an illustration
of the anti-type.
The anti-type is the fulfillment.
The antity is always greater.
The flood is given as one of the types of baptism.
So is the deliverance of the Israelites through the Red Sea.
It's a type of baptism in both of those cases from what
were they delivered?
Well, in the case of the Israelites, they were delivered from idolatry
and slavery in Egypt.
In the case of the flood, they were delivered from idolatry and
death, because everyone not on the ark died.
What is the only thing greater than temporal death from which man
can be delivered?
The answer of course is eternal death.
There is nothing else greater from which you can be delivered.
And so if the type delivers from temporal death, the only thing
from which the antitype can deliver because the antitype is again necessarily
greater than the Greater than the type, well that's eternal death.
And so baptism delivers you from eternal death.
And now of course, Baptists and others, their hair will be on
fire when they hear that because they think that I'm denying
faith alone, grace alone.
They think I'm denying the soul eye I'm not.
What Lutherans are saying when we say this, because this is what
scripture says, is that God
uses means to create faith.
We call these the means of grace.
Baptism is one of them.
Baptism is the ordinary way in which an individual is brought into
the church of God because the ordinary means is baptism as an
infant. Now of course adult converts typically are going to have faith
because they heard the word, but that's because there are multiple means
of grace.
We are not saying that baptism in and of itself saves you.
Baptism saves you because it is a means by which God creates
faith in your heart, and therefore you are annexing to yourself, given
power by the Spirit to do so, the grace of God given
to humanity in the cross, the death and resurrection of Christ.
It is all by grace through faith.
That's how it works.
We are not saying that just because you were baptized, you're saved.
No, it's because baptism creates faith.
It is still solafide.
But as the verse makes clear, baptism now saves you.
And there is no way around that without denying the clear words
of scripture.
And this is why we so frequently attack bumper sticker theology, including
some of our own bumper stickers, where you have something that is
a valuable concept that is distilled down into simple words, but then
in time people forget what the concept was and they just use
the words as though that is the rule and norm.
And if a Protestant faithfully believes that only faith can save, the
works cannot save, then if they misapprehend baptism and communion as works,
well of course they can't be salvific.
And that's the entire disconnect here.
That's why we s that's why we focus this on who's doing
the verbs.
If we were saying I must baptize, I must be baptized, that's
the only way I can be saved, that would be false.
That would violate sola fide.
That's not what God says, that's not what we're saying.
It's not what Scripture says.
These things are given to us for our blessing.
And you know, as we've reiterated, you can receive faith from hearing.
You can receive faith from baptism, which by the way, is also
hearing. Once you're a Christian, once you have faith, regardless of how
it came to you, if you as a Christian say, Oh, I
was baptized, I don't need to hear the word, guess what?
You're going to stop being a Christian.
If you say, I hear the word, I don't need to be
baptized, you're not going to keep being a Christian.
If you say, I don't need communion, I've been baptized and I
hear the word, I don't need that stuff, you're not going to
be a Christian.
Because God commands these things.
These are gifts in their commands.
When God speaks, it's the same thing.
A gift of God is not optional.
You don't send it back.
You don't exchange it for something you like better.
You receive God's gift by faith and you give thanks to God
for what he in his infinite wisdom and mercy gave to you.
We can't send these things back and we can't say we don't
like them and they're not for us and I don't think they
do anything anyway.
That is fundamentally calling God a liar.
Regardless of how someone gets there rationally, to be in that place
spiritually is dangerous, even if you get everything else right, because what
have you done?
You've taken the solas, which are encapsulations of sound doctrine, and use
them to attack sound doctrine.
That's not what sound doctrine does.
Sound doctrine reinforces all other sound doctrine because God is one.
All of these things are interconnected.
All of these things have the same origin.
There's not people doing some things and God doing others.
All of this is from God.
And the same is true in the liturgy, which is the reason
you'll hear Christian or you'll hear Lutherans talking about the liturgy, we
typically will avoid talking about a worship service.
You'll hear us refer to it as the divine service.
And again, that's very explicitly consciously focusing on who's doing the the
verbs. If it's a worship service, well, I'm the worshiper.
I'm going there, I get dressed up or not.
I go, I worship.
Maybe it's loud, maybe I feel something.
That's me doing the worship.
We say divine service because it's true, and because it's a rejection
of the idea that we're going to church to do anything.
We're going there to receive God's gifts.
The divine service is the divine serving us in the Word, in
communion, and in baptism when you're blessed to witness one.
Because when you see someone else being baptized of any age, it's
a reminder of your own baptism, a reminder that I am baptized
because this happened for me as well.
All of these things, the reason that they're important to Lutherans is
that by pointing to God, we refuse to point to ourselves, which
by the way is the point of the soul eye.
The idea is that if God is doing this stuff, all we
have to believe in is that God is going to keep being
God. I don't have to worry if my faith isn't strong enough.
I don't have to worry if I didn't decide for Christ in
the right way.
I don't have to worry if my fruits don't bear out my
faith. All I have to worry about is whether God is God.
And that's no worry at all for the Christian.
God cannot help but be God.
And when God puts his name on you, there's nothing for you
to worry about when you trust in those promises.
The gift of Lutheran doctrine is a distillation of these things to
the point that there can be no ambiguity about how we're saved
or about what we do once we're saved.
And the reason that we look weird to other Protestant denominations is
that this fundamentally different approach to a couple questions leads to radically
different conclusions.
And
they're they're radical.
it's your on your they're as far as the East is from
the West.
When we say baptism saves you and someone says baptism doesn't save
anyone, that's intractable.
Somebody is calling God a liar.
And that's the reason that it's worth fighting for.
It's worth fighting for sound doctrine because if you can't trust God
at His Word, why bother being a Christian at all?
Why waste time and money and effort on church?
You can go live a self-centered life and not worry about any
of this crap.
If you trust and believe in God, it changes you.
The indwelling of the Holy Spirit changes your life forever.
It means the things that you once found pleasing, you now find
disgusting, but because they're contrary to God's will.
And the more that God pours that blessing out on us, the
easier it does is for us to stay away from the margins,
to stay away from the errors that can lead to damnation, that
can lead to doubt that will cause us to lose our faith
in God.
And the gift of Lutheran doctrine is that it's Christian doctrine.
Like Corey said at the beginning, he read what Luther had wrote
and he said, This is what I believe.
He'd never read it before.
It had never been explained to him that way.
And yet because he read scripture and he believed scripture when he
saw how it was argued in a Lutheran context, in a Lutheran
di uh dialect, it made sense.
Being Lutheran is not a particular type of being Christian.
Being Lutheran is being a faithful Christian.
And those are fighting words because again, everybody else says the same
thing, and most one of us is right.
And Cory and I believe that if you look at scripture and
you compare it to the manner in which Lutherans faithfully discuss it,
it's the same picture.
It's an explanation in God's language of what God has already said.
And someone with the Holy Spirit cannot help but say, Yeah, that
makes sense.
And over and over again, we see that happening in our own
lives with other people.
It's not this is not speculative.
It actually happens.
You
mentioned that Lutherans will call it the divine service.
There's another term that I have to bring up the German because
of course it is also called the Gottistienst, which just means that
it is God's service, which we are recognizing really we're recognizing it
in both English and in German, just in a slightly different way.
This is God's service.
The direction is God coming to us and then us responding to
God. Which of course is just what scripture says, because we love
him because he first loved us.
Without me you can do nothing.
Without God, without God coming to us first, we cannot respond to
him, we cannot do anything because we are dead in sin and
trespass, and corpses do not act.
So there is no making a choice for God.
There is no coming to God of your own volition.
You are Lazarus.
You are dead in the tomb, that's why that's in Scripture.
Because you are the corpse.
And unless God comes to you and enlivens you with his word,
which he can also bring to you through the sacrament of baptism,
you cannot do anything.
And so that is the recognition of the Lutheran liturgical service is
that we are coming into God's presence into his house to receive
his gifts.
And that is the big difference.
We are not doing as so many other Christian traditions believe, it
is not first and foremost us coming to God and worshiping Him
and then begging Him for things.
It is us coming to God to receive the things He has
promised to give us where He has promised to give them, and
then responding in thankfulness and worship to him for those gifts.
It is important to recognize which direction things are flowing in the
divine service, and most Christian traditions get it exactly backward
In the show notes, we will link uh three videos that Pastor
Whedon did with Matt Whitman of the 10 Minute Bible Hour.
I think we mentioned before, we'll link them again because those videos
show part of what the divine service looks like.
And Wien does a great job of explaining why we do things
the way we do, why the liturgy and the divine service looks
so different from the enthusiastic sort of worship that is that is
so common, especially in things like megachurches that are frankly some Lutheran
churches are are being pushed to do that and some are are
open mega churches too.
Uh and that's actually the the last thing we want to talk
about today that we've described uh how we became Lutheran, why we
are Lutheran, why we believe it's important, and now we want to
close with why we fight for Lutheranism, rather than simply leaving.
Um I think the simply leaving part I hope we've made clear
that we don't believe that there's anywhere else to go.
We don't believe that there is another denomination that has a more
clear confession of Christian doctrine.
You know, when when someone of any denomination reads the small catechism,
the section on baptism they may disagree with, second on section on
communion they may disagree with, everything else they're probably going to agree
with completely, even though they've never heard it before, even though they
might not know or care about Luther, when you read those explanations
in a Lutheran dialect, you're like, yeah, this is what I believe.
The Lutheran faith is fundamentally the ecumenical Christian faith, which is really
what Catholic means.
It means universal or of the whole.
It doesn't mean Roman.
Catholic doesn't mean papist.
It's some people are trying to reclaim that word, but it's it's
lost due to abuse.
But fundamentally the Catholic Church is the true church where true doctrine
is preached, and we believe that that is here.
Uh whether or not the Missouri Synod is going to survive, I
don't know.
It's been around 175 years.
It started on really rocky ground, not doctrinally, but just situationally.
They were effectively refugees from Saxony.
They came to the Midwest, you know, really on the frontier and
things immediately went horribly wrong in multiple ways.
Uh they muddled through and they became they began to quickly grow.
And initially a lot of the growth was
they also lost one of their ships in route.
Yeah, I think they didn't even all make it to the US.
Yeah. And yet they grew substantially, and a lot of that growth
was from other Germans coming and then refining the original Lutheran faith,
which had basically been wiped out in Germany, the reason they were
they were not economic refugees, they were religious refugees because of the
Prussian Union.
The only way that they could practice this doctrine that we cling
to was to flee their homeland because it had effectively in some
parts been banned, and so coming here was the only way they
could continue to preach and and practice faithfully.
We don't care about a particular corporation or a particular designation for
its own sake.
The LCMS has roots 175 years old.
Lutheranism has roots 500 years old.
The Christian church has roots two thousand years old.
The Christian faith has roots six thousand years old.
We don't the only root that we need to worry about is
the root that we have in Jesus Christ and in his word
that's given to us in scripture.
So the reason that Corey and I fight today for the LCMS
is because it's it's what we have, it's where we are, this
is our backyard.
These disagreements that occur in the church, these places where there are
pastors who seek to introduce un Lutheran and in some cases unchristian
practices into the church, that's our problem.
You know, we we hear the things that are going on in
Rome and we'll take pot shots at it sometime, but it's not
it's not our fight.
R Rome is already a mess before the th latest thing that
happened. So if Rome keeps being a mess, that just tells us
that there's still Rome.
That doesn't give us new information.
The Missouri Synod started out doctrinally strong and has grown increasingly less
so over time.
And we'll link in this show uh stream that Corey and I
did along with two other friends last night on YouTube discussing the
large cataclysm blow up that occurred when last week the LCMS through
Concordia Publishing House, published a brand new large catechism that has a
bunch of uh new essays that include horrific false doctrine across the
board. some of the essays are good, but there's so much garbage
in there, the every copy should be burned.
And we were the first that went to war against this thing
because we thought it was evil.
Now there are other things that we've gone to war against and
we bet ignored or we've been shouted down.
This time, you know, when this began, I I tweeted on the
very first day something to the effect that this these annotations, these
changes to the the Lutheran doctrine in this book from Synod are
evil. And I effectively said the pastor if pastors don't speak up
about this, they're cowards.
And that was a challenge.
And honestly, I didn't think that I didn't expect people to rise
to the challenge.
Not that it was my challenge.
Like I didn't I didn't do anything.
Corey and I didn't do anything.
Ryan Turrepsey didn't except for publicize to the whole church that there
are deep-seated problems.
And one of the reasons that we are having these fights in
the open is that for a long time these fights have been
happening in secret and they kept getting buried.
I think that most people don't you know, most people have heard
about Elka today.
You know that it's the largest American Lutheran denomination.
And you know that it's apostate.
You know that they have tranny demons, they have lesbians, they have
every every sort of perversion you can have.
They're universalists, they deny God, they deny the creeds, they deny everything.
They're not Christian.
By any measure, they're not Christian.
What most people don't know is that Elka is not Christian because
of the LCMS.
In the forties, in the fifties, in the sixties, and then ultimately
in the seventies, there was a fight in the LCMS that was
called at the time the battle for the Bible.
It was a battle over scriptural inerrancy.
Is the word of God really the word of God?
Can we trust it?
Can we understand it?
Can we believe it?
Do we need to stick to it or can we believe different
things? And there is an increasingly vocal group of pastors at the
time, including some in very high places, who were openly pushing to
cast down the Bible and say, Well, that's not what that means.
We're gonna go in a different direction.
We need to be more Christian than this Bible thing is gonna
let us do.
We got to have more love, and that's gonna mean setting some
of this stuff aside.
This common culminated in the early 70s in what's called seminex.
It was a seminary in exile.
It was basically where the St.
Louis Seminary effectively imploded.
All but I think five of the professors remained.
The rest all walked out, most of the student body walked out
because they agreed with this radical satanic agenda of the destruction of
the Christian church.
They were trying to destroy Christian the scripture because they intended to
destro destroy the LCMS.
By God's grace, the Bible won, God won, and the demons of
Seminex left.
You know where they went?
They went to the one of the predecessor bodies of Elka and
they quickly took over that predecessor body.
They became those in the greatest influential seats.
They shaped what became Elka, and then they ran Elka.
They ran Elka right into the ground.
All of the demon demonic things that you see in Elka today,
they came out of the LCMS by men who were at one
time they were rostered, they had collars, they were well well respected,
they were believed to be Missouri Synod Lutherans.
And And again, by God's grace, they were driven out because they
were demons.
They were wolves of the highest order.
And unfortunately, we didn't drive all of them out, but most of
them we got rid of.
There are regions of this country today where Lutheranism once sort of
existed and basically doesn't exist anymore because we didn't drive out the
pastors who had graduated from the seminary at the time when these
demons were teaching everyone.
And so these guys just sort of festered, but by God's grace,
either they all just retired because they were lazy, they didn't believe
in being called for life, or they're all dead.
They're increasingly dying.
They're almost all gone now because they were they were early boomers.
And so they've basically been removed from the board now.
But it's crucial to make the point that ELKA is demonic because
the LCMS expelled a demonic presence in its own midst.
We're facing that again today.
The evils that were arising in the forties and fifties and sixties
that culminated in 7x, they never went away because Satan's never going
to go away.
And we should give thanks to God for that.
We should thank God that the Missouri Synod has something today that
Satan has to destroy.
He keeps coming at us and keeps coming at us because we
have sound doctrine.
It's not perfect anymore.
If it ever was, it's certainly far less perfect than it was
in Walther's Day.
But even at that, Satan still needs to destroy us in order
to complete his plans for this world.
And so when we see pastors today calling us evil for pointing
out things that are evil in the Missouri Synod, I'm thankful for
that. That makes that fills me with joy.
I don't mind being called evil by these men who are gonna
spend eternity in hell with the same demons from seminx, because they're
on the same side and they're trying to accomplish the same things.
Destruction of this church is unspeakably evil, and as long as Corey
and I draw breath, we will not permit it.
We will we will light every signal beacon, we will pull every
alarm, we will raise every stink that we possibly can.
Because frankly that's all we can do.
All we can tell people is all we can do is bear
witness. We can tell people what's going on.
We have no power.
We have no authority.
We're two men.
We're two stones crying out in the wilderness saying, There's a problem.
The church needs to deal with it.
And thankfully, yesterday, the church said yes there's a problem that needs
to be dealt with.
President Matt Harrison admitted that CTCR needs to be reined in, that
there are problems with what they're doing.
He didn't go so far as to say that they all need
to be defrocked and fired.
It's probably not get not gonna get there, but that would be
the just outcome for the situation.
Even today we have Jack Kilcreese, who's a member of the CTCR,
continuing to defend the evil in that catechism, taking full credit for
it. And he made clear that he's gonna go fight with Harrison
to try to make sure that this continues.
Well, it's up to God whether or not that happens.
I I hope that God will steal Harrison's heart and that he
has the fight in him to preserve sound doctrine.
And if he doesn't, I hope that God will give him the
wisdom to understand that he's no longer the man to fight these
battles. Cause frankly, we've been losing them over and over again.
This is not a fluke.
this just as seminx is connected to this, the national youth gathering
last year, the blow up at Concordia University, Wisconsin, where exactly the
same racial animus was being spread by the same people, incidentally.
The fact that it's happening with CTCR's blessing through CPH on behalf
of Synod is a huge deal.
It is a pattern.
It is not a fluke.
It's not a one time thing.
It's not a couple essays.
It's a consistent group of people inside the church seeking its destruction
by spreading false doctrine.
There will be some in some other church bodies who will be
listening to the history of what has happened.
Happened in particularly American Lutheranism, although not just in the US, of
course, we did mention Saxony.
And they will hear echoes of what is currently happening in their
own denominations, their own traditions, and there's a reason for that.
This happened to Lutherans earlier than basically everyone else, because it happened
in the circles of what's called higher criticism, or originally started out
as historical criticism, grew into higher criticism in the nineteenth and the
twentieth centuries, and all of that was basically in German.
And so Lutherans, German speaking Lutherans, had access to these materials, and
we have writings from Walter, the founder of our synod, arguing with
these false teachers in German.
Back and forth.
We have publication of it in our own journals.
We have him writing letters because they had access to the materials,
and so it did not really get translated into English.
It did not enter into other traditions and denominations in the U.S.
until significantly later.
We see some of these splits happening in the Baptists and even
Methodists and some others today, because it took that long to filter
through. Lutherans have already had these fights.
We have resolved them in some cases, they are ongoing in others.
In the case of Semenex, we did in fact eject most of
them, but not all of them, and so we are fighting a
cleanup operation now because that was allowed to fester and to become
a problem again.
But that's why it'll sound like, well, this sounds a lot like
what's happening in my tradition, because it is.
Satan is using the same playbook.
He is very intent on destroying the LCMS because the LCMS is
basically the last bastion in the world of true Lutheranism.
There are small, practically micro synods in some places that are faithful,
but there is nowhere else where you have this many Lutherans in
one body still holding to sound doctrine.
Yes, we have problems with our leadership.
Yes, we have some problems particularly at one seminary, but by and
large the rank and file, and that includes most of our pastors
in the LCMS are faithful men.
They believe what the scriptures say.
They believe insofar as they know them, and they could certainly know
them better.
We need to be better about instruction and higher level catechesis, but
insofar as they know them, they agree with what is said in
the confessions and they hold that.
And so Satan has to destroy that.
Because he has already destroyed most of the other churches.
Because most of the other churches did not actually mount a fight
against this stuff.
They rolled over.
The same as most of our societal institutions.
They did the same thing that the Academy did.
They got infiltrated, they didn't fight, and they lost.
Lutherans have been fighting this for two centuries now.
And we will continue to fight it as long as we have
to. Which will probably be as long as we can fight because
Satan does not give up in this life.
But that is the reason that Lutherans are being targeted.
Satan is going to target only those institutions he does not own.
There's no reason for him to target Elka.
He owns Elka.
What reason would he target them?
It doesn't benefit him.
So if you are being attacked, there is a reason for that.
That is why we see what is happening today in the LCMS.
Satan hates the LCMS because it is a faithful body by and
large. Yes, he has managed to corrupt some of the leadership, but
the whole point of that large catechism, the reason they tried to
push that through, the reason they will continue to try to push
that through and we will continue to have to fight it until
it is destroyed, not simply recalled, is because the large catechism is
the document that will be used by pastors to teach in their
parishes, and then by fathers, faithful fathers, to teach their families.
And that is why we have to have this fight over this
document. It is absolutely vital.
Because the resources that are used by the teachers in the church
will eventually become the beliefs of the entire church.
That is why Satan is targeting the things he is targeting.
That is why he targets the seminaries.
Because if he can target the seminaries, if he can take over
the seminaries, and he's done a pretty good job with one of
them, then he can get the men who will go out and
teach the rest of the church.
It's the same thing we saw
in the left hand kingdom.
Satan targeted and took over the universities because if you can take
over the universities, you can take over the government.
If you can take over the government, you've got the society.
Satan knows how to play the game, he's very good at it.
Christians need to get better at it.
It's the long march through the institutions.
It's the same playbook.
It's applied everywhere.
I I mentioned before the fight the fight that culminated in seminx
in the seventies began publicly in the forties.
Now that's important because it wasn't obviously the same fight the entire
time. That was the infiltration first making itself known in the in
the mid forties.
And the very first signals that something was wrong were very small
signals. You know, if you've ever seen something about radio telescopes, the
signals they're picking up from outer space are Space are incredibly faint.
There's virtually no signal there.
It's almost all noise.
And yet with the right tuning, with the right instruments and with
the right software, you can detect a signal that's coming from far
away, even though it's faint.
Now the signal in the forties wasn't particularly faint, but it was
exp exponentially fainter than it was by the seventies.
By the time 7X happened, it was all out in the open.
And the retrenchment occurred because they realized they went too far.
Some of them left, some of them remained.
They continued to subvert, some of them are dead, some of their
acolytes continue on to this day.
And to reiterate the the large catechisms corruption with these new essays
that teach new doctrines that are contrary to Christianity, they're being woven
in with things that sound Lutheran.
What these men are doing, men like Leopoldo Sanchez and all the
other guys, John Nunez, who wrote some of the worst essays in
there, they're spiritual groomers.
If you know anything about how a sexual predator grooms a small
child or a young woman who's not of age, who's dumb and
doesn't know what she's doing, a groomer begins small, enticing them with
something completely neutral, something that's appealing, that's not at all scary.
And then once they establish trust, what do they do?
They introduce a little bit of spice.
Something a little bit dangerous, a little bit transgressive, is introduced, knowing
that it's going to make the target, the the grooming target, uncomfortable.
The idea is to make them uncomfortable in that moment because they're
gonna push past it.
the victim is uncomfortable and then they back off, they say, ha
ha, just kidding.
And then they come back a little while later.
And now the thing that they pushed that was the transgressive element
is the new normal that thing that was a a small deception,
a small evil that has now been part of the conversation between
the groomer and the groomie gives them the opportunity to ratchet further,
to do something more overt and more overt and it's a gradual
process. The reason it's called grooming, it is it's not kidnapping.
It's not grabbing someone throwing in a van and taking them off
to the woods.
The groomer acts subtly, acts consistently over time.
They pick a target and they seduce it by measures and by
means and by degrees.
And the language that was introduced in the new large cataclysm is
absolutely groomer language for Satanism.
It's and it's not even particularly subtle.
Like they're not starting on step one.
They're starting on about step five.
If that catechism had been published 20 years ago, the entire synod
would have detonated on the spot, no question asked.
There'd been no one who'd been pushing back, because it openly says
that pedophilia is a burden that some people live with and it
says that if you are someone who is possessed by sexual depravity,
the Holy Spirit can't do anything for you.
It doesn't matter if you believe in God and if you repent,
you're still going to be stuck exactly the way you are forever,
because that's your identity.
That's demonic.
That is that is as satanic a thing as I've ever heard
ever happening in the Missouri Synod.
And is being done by these radical leftist groomers who work in
the dark and they sneak this stuff in, hoping that no one
would notice.
And if our group of friends had not noticed when this dropped,
it would have gone.
It did no one would have said anything.
Eventually someone might have said, huh, do you notice this guy wrote
this essay?
It's kind of sketchy.
It was only by the efforts of a few faithful laymen who
said this is evil and this Wilma stand.
And you know what?
By God's grace, Synod is at least now listening.
Uh Ryan Turnipseb, the gentleman, and that is his real name, that's
his legal name, who initially published the thread with these findings of
just a Of just a small piece of the evil in the
large cataclysm.
His thread today was on Revolver News, which is basically the new
Drudge Report.
The reason that's important is because it flies in the face of
the claims of many of these radical leftists inside the LCMS today
who are saying, oh, that language is fine.
that's gospel.
You just you need to understand it in context.
That's okay.
When the average revolver news reader can read it and say, Yeah,
that's Marxism, that is absolutely evil.
I see this crap everywhere.
This is the same language that I'm taught in at work when
I'm being indoctrinated annually as part of my diversity, equity, and inclusion
brainwashing. It's exactly the same language that the Missouri Synod published.
And so for a bunch of Lutherans who are not true Lutherans,
they're liars.
For those groomers to say, oh, it's fine, you just don't understand,
you don't get it, it's just relax.
When pagans and people who are alien to our church can say,
you know, that's absolute evil.
That is the proof that the evil is open and it's overt
and these people need to be driven out.
And this is a fight that is going to reverberate for many
years because thankfully for the first time these open groomers, these spiritual
molesters have been caught red handed and enough people shouted initially that
they weren't able to drag the little kid into the woods.
They had to retreat and they're bloodied.
They've not they've not had blood drawn in a long time.
They're normally the ones doing the damage.
And they took it on the nose and they're reeling, right right
now, but they're pissed and they're gonna fight back.
And every faithful man in the Missouri Senate is going to continue
to fight them.
'Cause there's nowhere else to go.
I don't know if the Missouri Senate is gonna split or fracture.
That's up to God.
Whatever happens down the road, we will continue to be faithful to
God's word, and we will continue to be Lutheran because that is
the only way that we know how to do
it.
And by the time this comes out tomorrow, we will be highlighting
at least one more ongoing issue in synod in order to keep
up the pressure on our adversaries because the last thing they want
is for people to keep looking at them and to keep looking
at what they've been doing.
They would prefer this gets swept under the rug for the so-called
large catechism with annotations to go through another round of review and
then they will try to publish it with minor edits sometime later
in the year.
That's what they love to do, and we are not going to
let them do that.
We are going to keep pointing out all of the places they're
hiding. We are going to turn over every rock and find all
of these snakes.
Because that is our duty to God and to the sheep in
this church.
And
if they don't like it, they can either repent or they can
be driven out, because there's no third option.
They're not gonna win.
It's not gonna happen and it's no longer gonna happen in secret.
The one unfortunate thing that Matt Harrison has made clear to men
who care about these matters is that there's only a response from
his administration when there's public humiliation.
If this book had been intercepted when it was prepublication, we would
not have said something publicly.
We would have per first tried to prevent it from being published.
It was made public for the world.
And therefore it was necessary for this to be made public as
well. It was demonstrated at the National Youth Gathering.
It was demonstrated with Conf Concordia University Wisconsin, that only when the
Missouri Senate is humiliated for swinging so far to the left that
we make even normal non-Christian conservatives look like their Nazis by the
things that we're doing, that's when the Missouri Synod gets a bloody
nose and recoils.
It's humiliation that motivates obeying God.
That in itself is a separate problem.
We shouldn't have to resort to humiliation
for men to obey God and to do their duty.
But until such time as the CTCR, if it continues to exist
and God willing it won't, it's an abomination that should never ex
have existed.
CTCR exists because of seminx, because Saint Louis Seminary was so evil
that it could no longer be counted on to issue doctrinal statements,
and so a committee was created, a permanent standing committee that was
going to do it instead of the seminaries.
Well, the emergency passed and we just kept the new institution, and
now somehow we think it's good.
Good. Turns out, unsurprisingly, it's been co-opted as well.
CTCR is evil.
There are evil men on it, including John Pless and Jack Kilcrease,
who are pushing these things.
They continue to publicly defend the indefensible.
And I'm glad that this fight is happening in open out in
the open.
It's not us doing the fighting anymore.
All we can do is say, hey guys, there's a problem.
Here you go.
So until such time as the Missouri Senate cleans house and makes
sure that these things can happen again, we will continue to raise
the alarm.
We will continue to be on watch, and we will trust that
the faithful men in the synod, as Corey said there are many,
they will continue to make sure that these things don't happen, because
this is the last bastion that any of us have for this
sort of sound doctrine.
There's no other denomination we can go to that's not in worse
shape. And I include Wells and L's in that.
They're not my problem, so we're not gonna pick on 'em.
If you think that they're in better shape than us, y you
just don't know what's going on.
they're smaller, but they're subject to all the same societal pressures.
They're responding to them differently, but they're bending differently.
They're all inexorably marching in the same direction.
This is the fight of our generation, and it is again a
battle for the Bible.
The difference is at this time, rather than attacking attacking scripture directly,
it's just being reinterpreted.
We have Synod issuing these essays that weave Marxist dialectic with Martin
Luther to confuse the reader into thinking that they're the same thing,
so that the next time the reader hears in his Diversity, Equity
and Inclusion Brainwashing that that all of these Marxist ideas are good
actually, his response is gonna be, well, hey, my pastor told me
that's Lutheranism.
Maybe I shouldn't resist.
Even if his conscience is telling him it's evil, he's now been
anesthetized by the lies that the synod published, and thankfully again they
unpublished it.
We'll see if it remains unpublished and we will see if there
are future efforts to do this or worse.
This fight is only beginning, and I'm thankful that God has given
us this platform to be able to reach a few people, to
let them know what's going on.
And that as
things continue, hopefully more and more faithful men will be emboldened to
speak out as well
because two jerks with a podcast are not going to do anything.
It takes men who have the boldness to say, I will not
let this happen to my church.
It's what all the fathers in the faith that we proclaim as
heroes did, and yet today we're still looking for such heroes to
stand up from among our clergy.
They're there.
They just need to find the courage to act.
And God willing, we will be able to do something to embolden
them to do what God expects of them, not because we said
it, not because other people think it's a good idea, because if
they are convicted by scripture, they have no choice to boot but
to do anything else.
Because that is why we are here and that's why we are
speaking to
The
short version of why we are doing what we are doing and
why we are going nowhere, and why we will continue to fight
for this church body, even if the name has to change, depending
on how things go, is to echo the words of Peter that
we say in the divine service every Sunday, Lord to whom shall
we go?
You have the words of eternal life.