Church Discipline

I am thoroughly enjoying Ratke's text on Lohe. The following caught my attention today:

Church discipline (Kirchenzucht) is an integral part of pastoral care. It is the congregation's exercise of pastoral care. If souls are to be saved, then for the sake of souls, individuals may, from time to time, need to be excluded from the life of the congregation. Such an individual who is excluded has already in fact excluded himself or herself form the congregation by either confession or action. The congregation is merely acknowledging this individual's decision to turn away. But the congregation's ministry only begins here because it must regularly pray for that individual and leave open the door for return into fellowship centered in the apostolic Word. There is always hope: "many a man has lived his life in such a way that only on his deathbed did salvation come to him through the grace offered in pastoral care." The door is always open; one need merely to walk through it into the fellowship of those who have responded to the call, to those who have received God's Word of grace (186).

A Picture of Missiology

Another great excerpt from Ratke's text on Lohe, this one on conversion and the role of the Church in mission.

Christians do not have to consciously go about trying to convert others. One need only go about the task of being a Christian in a given location. A congregation need only go about the task of being the church in its location. God, through the Holy Spirit, converts people. This does not mean that Christians relax, that they are exempt from the responsibility of witnessing to the Gospel. Lohe wrote: "Remember that the almighty God wants and commands the active participation of the church in the work of converting heathens. Remember that God converts people through people and wants to make humans co-workers in the working of God's grace." Again Lohe wants to avoid the notion that humans can evade responsibility in the establishment of God's reign on earth...(159).

The centrality of the church in Lohe's theology of mission reveals some affinity to mission as understood in Eastern Orthodox theology. Lohe wrote that "mission is nothing but the one church of God in motion" and that "mission is the life of the catholic church." Mission is not a function of the church; it is the church. The church is not the church if it is not in mission. Eastern Orthodox theologians argue similarly. Ion Bria states that "the church is the aim of mission, not vice versa" and that it is "ecclesiology which determines missiology." Mission begins in the church (164).

The Centrality of the Holy Eucharist

Reading David C. Ratke's, Confession and Mission, Word and Sacrament: The Ecclesial Theology of William Lohe, I was struck by the following excerpt:

Of the two peaks in the liturgy, the Sacrament of Communion is, for Lohe, the higher. Eucharist is the center of the church's inner life as well as its public expression. The Sacrament of the Altar expresses the fullness of the church's message: repentance, forgiveness, Christ's ubiquity, atonement, communion, grace, divine transcendence, divine incarnation. All the essential elements of the church's proclamation are found in the Sacrament of the Altar. Because the central elements of the church's proclamation are present in Holy Communion, it is the higher peak (115).

As we prepare ourselves to receive the benefits of the Liturgy, we are wise to consider the source and summit of our faith...found in the Holy Supper of our Lord.

Understanding the Church Today

Last week I read Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's (Pope Benedict XVI) text on the nature of the Church entitled: Called to Communion - Understanding the Church Today.

I've highlighted a few excerpts below that address some concerns from my previous posts. Note especially how Benedict's ecclesiology is rooted is apostolicity and the consequences of abandoning such an approach:

The Protestant notion that the "succession" consists solely in the word as such, but not in any "structures", is proved to be anachronistic in light of what in actual fact is the form of tradition in the New Testament. The word is tied to the witness, who guarantees it an unambiguous sense, which it does not possess as a mere word floating in isolation. But the witness is not an individual who stands independently on his own. (67)

The Roman primacy, or, rather, the acknowledgement of as the criterion of the right apostolic faith, is older than the canon of the New Testament, that "Scripture"...We can therefore say Scripture became Scripture through the tradition, which precisely in this process included the potentior principalitas - the preeminent original authority - of the Roman see as constitutive element. (70-71)

If Orthodoxy starts from the bishop and from the eucharistic community over which he presides, the point on which the Reformed position is built is the Word: the Word of God gathers men and creates "community". The proclamation of the Gospel produces - so they say - congregation, and this congregation is the "Church". In other words, the Church as institution has in this view no properly theological status; only the community has theological significance, because what matters is the Word alone. (80-81)

Apostolicity and catholicity serve unity, and without unity there is also no holiness. (95)

...ordination is not about the development of one's own powers and gifts. It is not the appointment of a man as a functionary because he is especially good at it, or because it suits him, or simply because it strikes him as a good way to earn his bread; it is not a question of a job in which someone secures his own livelihood by his own abilities, perhaps in order to rise later to something better...One can receive what is God's only from the sacrament, by entering into the mission that makes me the messenger and instrument of another. Of course, this very self-expropriation for the other, this leave-taking from oneself, this self-dispossession and selflessness that are essential to the priestly ministry can lead to authentic human maturity and fulfillment. (115)

But there is a general question that is more relevant to our problem. Everything that men make can also be undone again by others. Everything that has its origin in human likes can be disliked by others. Everything that one majority decides upon can be revoked by another majority. A church based on human resolutions becomes merely a human church. It is reduced to the level of makeable, of the obvious, of opinion. Opinion replaces faith. And in fact, in the self-made formulas of faith with which I am acquainted, the meaning of the words "I believe" never signifies anything beyond "we opine". Ultimately, the self-made church savors of the "self", which always has a bitter taste to the other self and just as soon reveals its petty insignificance. A self-made church is reduced to the empirical domain and thus, precisely as a dream, comes to nothing. (139-140)

After reading Benedict's text, I am further convinced that when individual interpretation drives theology, and when this interpretation is done without some measure of oversight and accountability, the result more often than not leads to heresy. The Church and the Gospel she proclaims is not opinion, and most certainly should not be subject to preferences outside her jurisdiction.

Why So Much Mary?

I am often asked why, as a Lutheran, I give so much attention to the Mother of our Lord - the Blessed Virgin Mary. As much as I wish it were not the case, Marian devotion is very small outside of Roman Catholic and Orthodox circles (despite Martin Luther's high Mariology).

Finishing Hugo Rahner's text, Our Lady and the Church, this morning, I was struck by the following quotes that I think encapsulates the role and function of Mary in the Christian faith. What particularly struck me is how much Mariology is intertwined with Christology and Ecclesiology - how to know Christ and His Church is to know His Mother, and to honor Christ and His Church is to honor His Mother. In short, if one believes Jesus is important to the Christianity, then one should believe the Blessed Virgin Mary is as well.

Rahner notes:

For her acceptance of the Incarnation was the acceptance of death. Her blood she gave Him, only for Him to shed it. And this also is fulfilled in the Church: the Church, like Mary, is the woman who brings Christ into the world, only to be sacrificed upon the altar. Incarnation and death are made one in the Church's sacraments, for in the sacrificial death, Christ's Body is every day reborn. Thus the symbol of the valiant woman is fulfilled also in the Church and in her vocation on earth: valiant indeed is this great woman of the world, since as the mystical mother of Christ crucified, daily she meets death again. This acceptance of death, in which she follows Mary, is verified in her day-to-day, her persecution, and her daily cares (90-91).

[of both Mary and the Church]: The Mother of God is also the Foderis Arca, the ark of the covenant, in which God Himself came to rest, and this sacred vessel must needs be taken to its proper resting-place in heaven, following the risen Lord (127).

A Different America?

Peggy Noonan, in light of the current economic trends evident in America, believes we are heading toward a different "lifestyle" in America. She notes:

...Some of this—the desire to live less expensively, and perhaps with greater simplicity—seems to key off what I am seeing in Manhattan, a place still generally with more grievances than grief, and with a greater imagination about how badly things are going to go than how bad it is right now. Many think that no matter how much money is sloshing through the system from Washington, creating waves that lead to upticks, the recession is really a depression. We won't "come out of it," as the phrase goes, for five or seven years, because the downturn is systemic, global, and because the old esprit is gone. The baby boomers who for 40 years, from 1968 through 2008, did the grunt work of the great abundance—work was always a long-haul trip for them, they were the first in the office in 1975 and are the last to leave the office to this day—know the era they built is over, that something new is beginning, something more subdued and altogether more mysterious. The old markers of success—money, status, power—will not quite apply as they have. They watch and work as the future emerges.

In New York some signs of that future are obvious: fewer cars, less traffic, less of the old busy hum of the economic beehive. New York will, literally, get dimmer. Its magical bright-light nighttime skyline will glitter less as fewer companies inhabit the skyscrapers and put on the lights that make the city glow...

And predicts that:

...The New York of the years 1750 to 2008—a city that existed for money and for all the arts and delights and beauties money brings—is for the first time going to struggle with questions about its reason for being. This will cause profound dislocations. For a good while the young will continue to flock in, for cheaper rents. Artists will still want to gather with artists—you cannot pick up the Metropolitan Museum and put it in Alma, Mich. But there will be a certain diminution in the assumption of superiority on which New York has long run, and been allowed, by America, to run.

More predictions. The cities and suburbs of America are about to get rougher-looking. This will not be all bad. There will be a certain authenticity chic. Storefronts, pristine buildings—all will spend less on upkeep, and gleam less.

So will humans. People will be allowed to grow old again. There will be a certain liberation in this. There will be fewer facelifts and browlifts, less Botox, less dyed hair among both men and women. They will look more like people used to look, before perfection came in. Middle-aged bodies will be thicker and softer, with more maternal and paternal give. There will be fewer gyms and fewer trainers, but more walking. Gym machines produced the pumped and cut look. They won't be so affordable now.

Hollywood will take the cue. During the depression, stars such as Clark Gable were supposed to look like normal men. Physical perfection would have distanced them from their audience. Now leading men are made of megamuscles, exaggerated versions of their audience. That will change.

The new home fashion will be spare. This will be the return of an old WASP style: the good, frayed carpet; dogs that look like dogs and not a hairdo in a teacup, as miniature dogs back from the canine boutique do now.

A friend, noting what has and will continue to happen with car sales, said America will look like Havana—old cars and faded grandeur. It won't. It will look like 1970, only without the bell-bottoms and excessive hirsuteness. More families will have to live together. More people will drink more regularly. Secret smoking will make a comeback as part of a return to simple pleasures. People will slow down. Mainstream religion will come back. Walker Percy again: Bland affluence breeds fundamentalism. Bland affluence is over.

An intriguing, inviting, and I believe, highly possible future...

The Symbol of the Church

Another nugget from Rahner's text, Our Lady and the Church:

"Here once again it becomes plain that there is a common ground for the fact that all heresies are ultimately a denial of the Incarnation of our Lord, beginning with a refusal to honor His holy mother and continuing with a rejection of the virginity of the Church: where the mother of Jesus is not, there can be no marriage. For she is the woman, who alone has overcome all heresies, because as virgin and mother she is the symbol of the Church, which will always hold fast to the fullness of Christ's revelation and thus preserve ever unspotted her virginity; and this she will achieve precisely through bringing to birth the multitude of nations which she carries in her womb. Mary is ever present, and ever voicing the needs of the nations: 'They have no wine.' The marriage-feast continues among the nations begotten of Eve. For the Church is ever present, the mother of all the living, the mother of Jesus" (57).