Lutheran Church

8 Key excerpts on "Lutheran Church"

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  All About Lutheranism

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University Publications

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter- 1 Introduction to Lutheranism Lutheranism is a theological movement to reform Christianity with the teaching of justification by grace through faith alone. Lutheranism identifies with the theology confessed in the Augsburg Confession and the other writings compiled in the Book of Concord. Lutheranism is a major branch of Western Christianity that identifies with the theology of Martin Luther, a 16th century German reformer. Luther's efforts to reform the theology and practice of the church launched the Protestant Reformation. Beginning with the 95 Theses, Luther's writings disseminated internationally, spreading the ideas of the Reformation beyond the ability of governmental and churchly authorities to control it. The name Lutheran originated as a derogatory term used against Luther by Johann Eck during the Leipzig Debate in July 1519. Eck and other Roman Catholics followed the traditional practice of naming a heresy after its leader, thus labeling all who identified with the theology of Martin Luther as Lutherans. Martin Luther always disliked the term, preferring instead to describe the reform movement with the term Evangelical, which was derived from a word meaning Gospel. Lutherans themselves began to use the term in the middle of the 16th century in order to identify themselves from other groups, such as Philippists and Calvinists. In 1597, theologians in Wittenberg used the title Lutheran to describe the true church based upon the true doctrine of the gospel. The split between the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics began with the Edict of Worms in 1521, which officially excommunicated Luther and all of his followers. The divide centered over the doctrine of Justification. Lutheranism advocates a doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone which went against the Roman view of faith formed by love, or faith and works.

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  The Reformation

  • Williston Walker(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R V. THE Lutheran ChurchES OF GERMANY. H E successive differentiations of the Sax-on reformers from other and from more radical revolutionary leaders, culminat-ing in the Marburg colloquy, were rapidly changing the Lutheran revolt from a protest by a party within the one historic Church against abuses and assumptions, and from an assertion of particular theories of the way of sal-vation, of the sources of authority and of the con-stitution of the Church, into a distinct ecclesiastical body resting on a definite and exclusive confessional basis. This growth of belief into dogma appears in the Schwabach Articles which Luther prepared within a fortnight after the debate at Marburg (Oc-tober 16, 1529), and which were to serve in part as the basis of a much more significant creed-statement eight months later, After enumerating eleven ar-ticles of faith, he therein declared that the Church is formed by believers in Christ, who maintain, be-lieve and teach the aforesaid articles and particu-lars. '' Yet Luther and Melanchthon felt themselves far more one with the adherents of Rome, however strongly they denounced the papacy and the corrup-181 182 The Reformation. tions of the Roman Church, than with Anabaptists or even with Zwinglians. They had not separated from the Roman Church, so much as from its abuses. Reunion with it, on conditions honorable to both, though not probable, seemed not impossible. It was under the dominance of these two somewhat divergent forces, the one impelling toward the erec-tion of a standard of Lutheran orthodoxy, the other toward the largest possible friendliness to Rome consistent with the maintenance of their own prin-ciples, that the greatest creed of Lutheranism, the Augsburg Confession of 1530, was prepared. From Italy, where he received the imperial crown at the hands of the now friendly pope, Charles V . sent out, on January 21, 1530, the call for a Reichs-tag to meet at Augsburg.

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  The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe

  • C. Dixon, C. Dixon, Kenneth A. Loparo, Luise Schorn-Schütte(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  5 The Clergy and the Theological Culture of the Age: The Education of Lutheran Pastors in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Thomas Kaufmann The Lutheran Reformation originated from a new university, the territo- rial University of Wittenberg, founded in Electoral Saxony in 1502. 1 It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of this basic historical fact. The faculty was predominantly made up of younger academics, most of whom were ready and willing to see their university make its mark against the traditional centres of learning in the Holy Roman Empire. Moreover, both the still relatively flexible institutional struc- tures and the programme of theological studies allowed for a degree of innovation (such as that inspired by the Humanist agenda of educa- tional reform) which would have been much more difficult to establish anywhere else. Indeed, the fact that the Lutheran Reformation found its point of origin in a university reveals a fundamental fact about its nature which distinguishes it to a significant degree from the Reformation movements in Switzerland and southern Germany. Whereas the most important protagonists of the new faith in Zurich (Huldrych Zwingli), Basel (Johannes Oecolampadius) and Strasbourg (Martin Bucer) were pastors, the most influential figures of the Wittenberg Reformation (Martin Luther, Andreas Karlstadt and Philip Melanchthon) were university professors. While the Reformation in Switzerland and southern Germany was characterized from the outset by a degree of polycentrism and led by several ‘leaders’ roughly similar in influence, the Lutheran Reformation had both the University of Wittenberg as a central institutional authority and Martin Luther as an unchallenged and massively influential personal point of reference for development. And while at first the evangelical pastors in Zurich and Strasbourg had to rely on collegial instructions for their theological 120

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  Denomination

  Assessing an Ecclesiological Category

  • Paul M. Collins, Barry A. Ensign-George, Paul M. Collins, Barry A. Ensign-George(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  . . . LWF member churches confess the triune God, agree in the proclamation of the Word of God, and are united in pulpit and altar fellowship. The LWF confesses one, holy, Lutheran Denomination 51 catholic, and apostolic church and is resolved to serve Christian unity throughout the world. 3 What Constitutes the “Church”? Luther and the Augsburg Confession In Luther’s pre-Enlightenment time the word denomination was as yet unheard of in ecclesial and ecclesiological contexts. Luther speaks about the “church”, “congregation”, and “holy Christendom”: Thus the word Kirche (church) means really nothing else than a common assembly, and is not German by idiom, but Greek (as is also the word ecclesia); for in their own language they call it kyria, as in Latin it is called curia. Therefore in genuine German, in our mother-tongue, it ought to be called a Christian congregation or assembly (eine christliche Gemeinde oder Sammlung), or, best of all and most clearly, holy Christendom (eine heilige Christenheit). 4 Luther urged his followers not to name their Church after him. We should call it the “Christian Church”, not the “Lutheran Church”, a fact which adherents of the Lutheran confession have happily and consistently ignored. Luther with his strongly christological theology would have wished that Christians would always refer to Christ; it is His Church to which we belong. With Luther’s aim of reforming the whole church, naming a church after a reformer would have meant polarization, division and exclusion. Indeed, for Luther this would have been a contradiction in terms. According to him, the church, then, is not a place of power, a hierarchy or a building, but primarily the gathering (congregation) of believers around Word and sacrament. 5 The Augsburg Confession’s definition of what constitutes the church is minimal: Article VII: Of the Church. Also they teach that one holy Church is to continue forever.

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  The Reformation in Germany

  • C. Scott Dixon(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Much of what the early Protestant authorities wanted to accomplish remained unfulfilled, many of the basic features of the religion had not taken root (Strauss, 1978, pp. 249–308; Vogler, 1981, pp. 158–96; Scribner, 1993b, pp. 221–41). No one realized this better than the Protestant clergy them-selves, in particular the Lutheran clergy, who withdrew deeper and deeper into a sense of pessimism, failure and impending doom as the century counted down. But perhaps the Protestant clergy were wrong, as we would be wrong, to judge the movement by the standards established by men of such systematic and inspired thought as Martin Luther, Huldyrich Zwingli and Jean Calvin. Perhaps the true legacy of the Reformation lies less in its faithfulness to an original vision than the complex, if unforeseen, change of per-spective it inspired. ‘Perhaps,’ writes Peter Matheson, ‘what happened in the Reformation was that one imaginative archi-tecture was replaced by another’ (Matheson, 2000, p. 7). For this much seems certain: once the Reformation movement had spread beyond the culture of the clergy and the schoolmen, it had the ability to inspire people to think differently about things, all things, from the world of the spirit to the matters of the mind to the constituents of earthly welfare. Few episodes in European history have embraced so many aspects of the human condition. 6 Reformation Histories In the sixteenth century, public understanding of the German Reformation was first expressed through figurations of Martin Luther. The reformer was portrayed in a number of symbolic guises, each of which served to explain and legitimize the move-ment. First and foremost was the notion of Luther as prophet, God’s chosen vessel sent to preach the Gospel and overthrow idolatry (by which the Protestants meant the papacy). Most of the leading reformers thought of Luther as God’s messenger on earth, and by mid-century this idea was rooted in the evangeli-cal histories of the day.

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  The Lutherans

  • L. DeAne Lagerquist(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  20 Luther received the theological insight that God's reconciling love comes by 148 THE LUTHERANS grace through faith as he studied the Bible and when he was a teacher of Bible. Again and again, in the history of Christianity such clarity has come in an encounter with the living Word of God in the written text. Bible reading was a definitive activity for European pietists such as Spener. Lutherans have contin- ued to read, sing, and pray the Bible, and in the middle decades of the century they renewed their study of it. Women's organizations long sponsored regular, usually monthly Bible study by publishing materials for use in local circles. Young people were taught the content of the Bible in Sunday school, vacation Bible school and confirmation classes. In the early 1960s Bethel Lutherans Church in Madison, Wisconsin, developed a multiyear Bible curriculum for adults. Using didactic pictures and memory work, the Bethel Series engaged thousands of Lutheran adults in sustained study of the Bible. Both the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church later produced their own programs. Word and Witness and SEARCH each combined materials written by biblical scholars with local leadership and small group work. While there can be no doubt that individuals increased their knowledge of the Bible and that relationships within congregations were encouraged by these programs, there is little evidence that these programs fostered any truly radical reforms. RE-FORMATION = NEW SHAPE If reformation is understood as a change in external forms or as taking on a new shape, American Lutheranism went through a two-part reformation in the last half of the century. The first painful step was the splitting apart of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which took place throughout the 1970s.

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  Theology in America

  Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War

  • E. Brooks Holifield(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  397 19 Lutherans: Reason, Revival, and Confession When Philip Schaff described the status of Lutheran thought in America in 1855, he had to admit that ‘‘the multifarious differences of opinions and schools’’ within the tradition made it ‘‘no easy matter’’ to define a uniform Lutheran theology. Lutherans were on the verge of division over the normative status of the historic Lutheran confessions. One group hoped to restore the authority of the Augsburg Confession of 1530, in which the European re-formers had presented their articles of belief before the Imperial Diet, and of the Book of Concord of 1580, which resolved theological disputes among second-generation Lutherans in Germany. Their ‘‘American Lutheran’’ oppo-nents claimed to honor the confessions but wanted to abandon ‘‘non-essential doctrines.’’ They also wanted to bring Lutheran theology into closer confor-mity with a more rational form of orthodoxy. The differences helped to split American Lutheran theologians into battling factions. ∞ The debate over confessions, or ‘‘symbols,’’ drew the Lutherans into dispute about evidential logic. The most prominent American Lutheran theologian of the early nineteenth century, Samuel Simon Schmucker (1799–1873) of Get-tysburg Seminary in Pennsylvania, the architect of the ‘‘American Lutheran’’ theology, not only followed the evidential model but also called for ‘‘liberty of thought’’ and regard for ‘‘the full influence of evidence’’ in any assent to the confessions. The confessionalists, their numbers strengthened by new immi- 398 Alternatives to Baconian Reason grants from Europe, charged that Schmucker’s position concealed a crypto-rationalism that lost sight of distinctive Lutheran truth. ≤ Reason Denied and Affirmed The place of reason in theology had often been a source of tension within the Lutheran tradition. Martin Luther (1483–1546) disparaged natural rea-son as a foe to faith.

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  Jesus and the Church

  The Foundation of the Church in the New Testament and Modern Theology

  • Paul Avis(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  6 The foundation of the church in Protestant theology Towards a critical revolution

  The creative impulse behind the theology of the Reformation was the power of the biblical word – especially in the form of the preached gospel – to reform and renew the church. These biblical and patristic texts were approached employing the methods of Renaissance Humanism (the study of humane literature). It is perhaps not too much to claim that the Reformers were critical scholars according to their lights. From the first, Protestant scholarship was receptive to critical-historical methods in principle.

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  For Martin Luther in particular, the church was the dynamic creation of the word, creatura verbi , including the sacramental word.

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  However, Protestant theology lost much of its dynamism in the seventeenth century. It developed three retrograde characteristics: (a) a complacent acceptance, on the part of many, of the existing divisions in the church (between the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformation churches, on the one hand, and within Protestantism, between the Lutheran and the Reformed churches, on the other); (b) a confessionalism with regard to the identity of the church and its theology that tended to treat, for example, the Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530) and the Formula of Concord (1577) and the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism (1563) or the articles of the Synod of Dort (1618–19) in practice as on the same level of authority as Holy Scripture; and (c) a movement towards a basically scholastic model of theological method that promoted logical analysis and systematic coherence, along with an exaggerated emphasis on doctrinal precision.

  In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the movement of spiritual vitality known as pietism, led by P. J. Spener and A. H. Franke, reacted against what it regarded as the dead orthodoxy of the Lutheran Church in Germany. In its spiritual rigour and fervent devotion, it prepared the ground for a renewal of ecclesiology. That renewal came in the work of F. D. E. Schleiermacher, himself a spiritual son of pietism in the form of the Moravian movement. Schleiermacher retrieved the authentic impulse of Reformation theology by approaching Christian doctrine in an existential and pastoral way. Protestant ecclesiology typically stresses the inward, spiritual reality of the church and is suspicious of the institutional, societal and hierarchical model favoured by Catholics (both Roman and Anglican). Schleiermacher was an outstanding critical scholar of the Bible, but his distinctive approach, which is typical of Protestantism, renders ecclesiology less vulnerable to a critique informed by the eschatological horizon of the New Testament.

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