Called

Recovering Lutheran Principles for Ministry and Vocation

Christopher J. Richmann

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506481302
• eBook ISBN: 9781506481319
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Called: Recovering Lutheran Principles for Ministry and Vocation explores vocation and the call to ministry from a Lutheran perspective and reveals their promise for the wider church. It offers a foundation and clarity for those considering the office of rostered ministry, while encouraging all believers to live their spiritual priesthood and faith vocation by responding to the gospel's call to love and serve the neighbor.

The book has two main parts: The first part provides a historical overview of the inner call to ministry in the European and American contexts. This inner call in Lutheranism was encouraged by pietist leaders and later required by orthodox writers. In the American context, nineteenth-century Lutherans in the Muhlenberg tradition gave unprecedented emphasis to inner call, and Midwest confessionalists continued the tradition of encouraging inner call while treating it separately from the "regular call." Both streams flowed into the twentieth century as the church experienced mergers and addressed the ordination of women.

The second part of the book provides a Lutheran theology of vocation and ministry, with chapters on vocation, ministerial call, and lay ministry. The importance of external factors is applied to the calling to the office of ministry, with applications for clergy commitment and mission, and to the priesthood of all believers, with applications for the mission of the church in an era of institutional decline.

The book aims to support pastors and others considering rostered ministry and helps thoughtful lay readers support ordained ministry while discovering their own rights and duties to minister. Called will be especially helpful for congregational call committees and denominational ministry candidacy committees.

1

European Foundations

Reformation Era

Christian theology and practice burst open in the sixteenth century. Within a few years of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, nearly every aspect of Christianity—from the Bible, to the sacraments, to the church—had come under scrutiny. For all the major Protestant leaders, freedom from Catholic dogma meant room to see one’s central assumptions to their logical conclusions—including their views on how God calls people to the office of ministry.

A survey of the theology of ministerial call among key Protestant reformers reveals the range of thinking on this issue. Studied in relation to each leader’s teaching on the sacraments, such a survey also shows how the distinct commitments of each thinker come out in the teaching on ministerial call. To get a rounded picture and provide crucial points of reference for later discussions in this book, we need to look not only at Luther and the Lutheran confessions but at an early supporter of Luther who became his adversary and a monumentally influential non-Lutheran who attempted throughout his career to find common ground with Lutherans.

Martin Luther

After 1517, Martin Luther increasingly recognized that his controversy with the dominant Catholic theology was not simply a matter of indulgences or abuses. The fault line ran deeper, penetrating to the core human concern: Where do humans meet God? When Luther accused his opponents of works righteousness, he was naming their theological assumption that salvation was the culmination of human attempts to ascend to God through the performance of works (assisted by varying amounts of grace) that supposedly conformed one to God’s image or will. Instead, for Luther, “the gospel is good news because it is the proclamation that fellowship with God occurs on the human, not the divine level.”1 According to Luther, the incarnation—God descending to humans in creation for their justification—was not only the historical locus of God’s saving act in Christ but the paradigm of all theology. God encounters, calls, blesses, judges, and saves humans in creation, not apart from or beyond it on some spiritual or divine plane.

Luther’s view of the incarnation determined his mature teachings on the means of grace (i.e., the ways God shows favor). God was in all things, said Luther, but what differentiated the means of grace was God’s promise attached to a particular thing; in these instances, God was not just present but present for you. Thus Luther confessed in the Large Catechism, the sacrament “is the true body and blood of the Lord Christ, in and under the bread and wine.”2 But “how Christ is brought into the bread,” Luther was not ashamed to admit, “I do not know.”3

Because God meets humans in creation for their salvation, the burden of proof, said Luther, was on those who rejected the plain meaning of Christ’s words: “This is my body . . . this is my blood . . . for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt 26:26, 28). According to Luther, one only looked for a way around Christ’s clear teaching, and thus “tortured” the Scriptures, if one took offense at the thought of God being in creation.4 Such attempts were motivated by a belief that “flesh” and “spirit” were distinct essences, with “spirit” being the higher or more divine, while for Luther, “‘spiritual’ must mean what the Spirit does and what comes from the Spirit.”5 The devaluation of material things had dire consequences, said Luther. Those who saw the Supper as a symbol for stirring pious memory turned the sacrament into a human work rather than a divine gift. And those who affirmed Christ’s spiritual presence while denying his bodily presence were guilty of separating the divine and human natures of Christ—a position that rendered the incarnation meaningless. In fact, those who desired to have God in “nothing but spirit” were left only “with the devil, who has neither flesh nor bone.”6 Instead, said Luther, “where you place God for me, you must also place the humanity for me.”7

God’s presence through Christ in creation established, for Luther, the principle that “the Spirit cannot be with us except in material and physical things.”8 This included the proclamation of God’s word. The creatureliness of the word of God led Luther to speak of preaching itself as a type of incarnation. “Yes, I hear the sermon,” said Luther, “but who is speaking? The minister? No, indeed! You do not hear the minister. True the voice is his; but my God is speaking the word which he preaches or speaks.”9 Luther had no problem putting Christ himself in the mouth of the preacher.

This insistence that God encountered humans on the human level also guided Luther’s theology of the call to ministry. For Luther, the external call through appropriate human channels constituted a call to ministry in its entirety. “When you are called to the ministry,” advised Luther, “you should consider the voice of the community as the voice of God, and obey.”10 As Luther’s ordination service (1539) exhorted the ordinand,

You must believe for certain that you were called by God, because the church sent you here and secular authority has called and desired you. For what the church and secular authorities do in these matters, God does through them, so that you may not be considered intruders.11

Since God spread the gospel through these human means, “if we emphasize the matter of call,” claimed Luther, “we can worry the devil.”12 Conversely, “He who preaches without [the call] ‘beats the air’ and glories in fruit existing only in his own foolish imagination.”13 Although the ceremony of ordination was beneficial for good order, the external call was the authority to preach. This was especially true when the call came from a congregation, although as Wilhelm Maurer put it, “The legal form of a call makes little difference to Luther.”14 Even without ordination by a bishop (the Catholic standard of the day), a minister “is confirmed anyway by virtue of the congregation’s call.”15

The authority of the call rested in God’s word. Given equally to all, the word of God established the Christian community, whose members all received the priesthood, the functions of which consist of teaching, preaching, baptizing, administering the Eucharist, binding and loosing sins, praying for others, sacrificing, and judging doctrine.16 However, a congregation of public ministers would result in chaos, and “no one individual can arise by his own authority and arrogate to himself alone what belongs to all.”17 Thus for the sake of order, this community must designate one or more of its members to the office of public ministry on its behalf. In this way, Luther maintained the distinction not between “lay” and “clergy,” as is often assumed, but between being Christian in general and the ministerial office.18 For Luther, a call was particular to a setting. He believed those called as “teachers” (i.e., with a teaching post) were called to proclaim truth and refute error everywhere.19 But a regular minister with a valid call in one locale had no absolute right to minister somewhere else, even if false teachings were being promulgated there.20 For this reason, Luther warned against wandering preachers who were “unable to produce their authorization.”21

According to Luther, an inner call could be valid in two circumstances. First, an inner call ought to “be proved with miraculous signs.” God may indeed directly call preachers, but without signs attesting to the call, “one can believe no one who relies on his own spirit and inner feelings for authority and who outwardly storms against God’s accustomed order.”22 Luther considered such miraculous verification to be a fulfillment of the biblical mandate for two or more witnesses:

As you boast of the Spirit, give me proof. You bear witness of yourself, and the Scriptures have forbidden me to believe you on your own testimony alone, for even Christ, the living Son of God would not bear witness of himself, as we read in the Gospel of John 5:31f. But when he did so he also did miracles besides, so that men might know that his Word and doctrine were true. And inasmuch as you say you have the Holy Spirit, give me a proof of your Spirit; prove it by real signs that a man may believe you, for here a divine witness is necessary to prove the Spirit of God, so that there may be two of you, yourself and God. This is a divine call, and unless it is forthcoming, cast the other away and let it go to pieces.23

So crucial was this divine witness that Luther advised believers even to reject the ministry of any self-proclaimed inwardly (or immediately) called preacher who had a right spirit and doctrine but lacked miracles as proof of God’s call. After all, “the devil can preach too.” In judging such “self-called” preachers, the question is not “what you preach, but whether you are sent.”24 God, who may test the faithful by sending preachers with a “true spirit” without a true call, would be pleased that his children obeyed his command to insist on two witnesses.25 In the spirit of 1 Corinthians 14, Luther felt that good order may restrain the proclamation of God’s true word—although it may never silence it.

Second, a kind of inner call may operate when one finds oneself in a region lacking any other Christians or capable preachers. In this circumstance, one may be certain “he needs no other call than to be a Christian, called and anointed by God from within.” This call, Luther explained, was simply the realization that “the duty of brotherly love” compelled a Christian to share the gospel where no others could.26 One may logically conclude that this was a circumstance (although for Luther, the only circumstance) in which an inner call was necessary, but such a distinction is functionally irrelevant given that it was a call that only became effective in obvious outward circumstances and equally applied to all Christians. “Any Christian should feel obligated to act,” said Luther, “if he saw the need and was competent to fill it, even without a call from the community.”27 But even in the case of a lack of preachers (but not Christians), it was better for the faithful to designate a minister, “to commit by common vote such an office to one or more, to be exercised in its stead.”28

Not surprisingly, Luther did not think those in his own day who claimed or based their authority to minister on an internal call met the above conditions. Luther regarded them all as false prophets, “all too highly spiritualized for me.” The refuge of Satan’s emissaries was the endless unverified appeal to the Holy Spirit, while Luther quipped, “I myself cannot boast very much of the Spirit.” Such wolves bragged of a Spirit that supposedly offered clandestine authorization to preachers, but Luther countered, “I boast of a Spirit of love.”29 Eminently dependent on God’s external means, Luther was proud to “hear no heavenly voice.”30

Luther especially reprimanded his former Wittenberg colleague Andreas Karlstadt. Luther believed Karlstadt both ran from his legitimate call at Wittenberg and illegitimately placed himself in the pulpit at Orlamünde, all in deference to what Karlstadt claimed was his “inner call.” Luther’s understanding and representation of Karlstadt’s actions were not always fair or reliable, yet Luther’s impressions of Karlstadt’s behavior revealed and refined important elements of Luther’s doctrine of ministerial call.31 For Luther, the appeal to an inner call was inherently unstable, as revealed by Karlstadt’s later acquiescence to return to Wittenberg.32 Karlstadt was probably in a no-win situation, for Luther likely would have castigated Karlstadt for stubbornness had he not agreed to return. Yet Luther’s point was clear: ministry was service performed at the request of the proper authorities, and the inner call was not a sufficiently stable rubric for the minister or God’s flock. Karlstadt’s stress on the inner call, said Luther, led him to “preach and write when no one has commanded or requested him to do so, and when he is requested to do so, he does not do it.”33 In Karlstadt, Luther saw all his concerns about the inner call confirmed.

According to Luther, the glory of the gospel is that God comes to humans in creation. Driven by this incarnation principle, Luther believed that present-day ministers receive a “mediated call,” externally, through the church—either a congregation or a representative of the church. Luther believed an “immediate call” (including an inner call) was possible but valid only when accompanied by signs. He railed against those who claimed an inner or immediate call, not only because they failed to produce the necessary signs but b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. European Foundations
• 2. American Developments
• 3. Callings and Vocations
• 4. Call to the Office of Ministry
• 5. Priesthood of Believers
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index