We Are Needed

Are Lutherans Afraid to Take on the World?

(from the November 2006 issue of the Lutheran Witness)

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

By the time you read this column the 2006 mid-term elections will probably be over. I don’t have to be a clairvoyant to predict right now that once again Lutherans will be woefully underrepresented among the 535 members of Congress. They always are. In the 109^th Congress, only 20 of Lutherans held seats – 16 from the ELCA, three from the LCMS, and one solitary man from WELS.

On the other hand, there were 44 Episcopalians, whose church is a mere quarter as big as the three Lutheran denominations put together.

So what’s the matter with us? Are we embarrassed by our identity? Sometimes it seems that way. There are Lutherans who want to be just mainline Protestants. Then there are Lutherans who want to be no different from Baptists. Then there are Lutherans who think like the late Rev. James D. Ford, Chaplain of the House of Representatives. “Lutheran, that’s boring,” he was overheard saying dismissively when somebody mentioned his denomination.

Indeed, where is Luther? Where is Luther’s pragmatic voice in this confused global environment where everybody from radical Muslims to befuddled, wayward Episcopalians seems to be “cooking and brewing the kingdoms together,” to use Luther’s dictum; he saw the devil at work where this occurs.

Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto is director of the Concordia Seminary Institute on Lay Vocation, St. Louis.

Here’s what Noll says about Luther: “In his voice we hear uncommon resonances of the voice of God.” If this is so – and I believe it is – then it is time for all of us to stop playing Amish, quit the sidelines, open our ears, listen to Luther, roll up our sleeves and start dirtying our hands. We are needed.

It’s more than a dozen years that Noll and similar great minds have told the oldest Protestant tradition that it was time to open up its theological treasure chest, knowing that if you share spiritual gems they do not diminish but actually multiply.

Luther’s voice should come with an American accent, proposes Dr. Mark A. Noll, the great evangelical historian teaching at the University of Notre Dame, who as the keynote speaker at the Concordia Forum emphasizes the “Need for a Lutheran Perspective on Christianity and Politics.”

We Lutherans have it all – the right doctrine, even the right institutions. We have excellent schools that could prepare the next generation to take on the world. We have universities that could produce the best and most responsible journalists if only they woke up to that need. We have people with money – if only they’d put it where Luther’s mouth was.

Called to Engage the Postmodern World – The Lutheran Voice in Contemporary America, reads the title of this two-day conference, which surpasses the usual scope of a divinity school. Consider the theme one of the lectures: “Where is Luther now that we need him?” asks Dr. Harold O.J. Brown, a renowned professor at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, NC, and co-founder of the initiative Evangelicals and Catholics Together.

Who would run for public office --- oops, isn’t that where Lutherans have become as squeamish as the Old Order Mennonites? Perhaps at the very moment you are reading this, a ground-breaking forum will be held Nov. 3-4 on the Campus of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. It will try to address precisely this issue – the reluctance of Lutherans in America to confront our increasingly complicated reality.

Imagine living without the knowledge while we do our duty in this sinful world we always have Christ’s right-hand kingdom to turn to for forgiveness and grace! Imagine going through life without the certitude of being at the same time sinners and acquitted! Who would want to get out of bed in the morning under those circumstances? Who would want to take care of their children, mend somebody else’s car, drill somebody’s tooth, or draw a cool beer for a thirsty man?

Well, if we did that Chaplain Ford would indeed be right: What a boring lot we would be! Imagine Lutherans without the liberating knowledge of being citizens of two realms, the spiritual and, yes, the unredeemed secular kingdom, where we must involve ourselves; where we must roll up our sleeves and act according to natural reason; where we lovingly serve our neighbors by performing our chores to the best of our abilities.

When I was at seminary, it was fashionable for Lutherans to call themselves beer-drinking Episcopalians. And when I went back to Germany recently I was stunned that even at a meeting of allegedly confessional Lutherans a participant suggested that we had better do away with our two kingdoms doctrine.

I have heard it say that the Hate-the-Hun hysteria after World Wear I sent Lutherans into the catacombs, including Lutherans who are not even of German descent. Is that why there hasn’t been a Lutheran President of the United States? Well, Dwight D. Eisenhower was a two-term president. He wasn’t a Lutheran, but he was of German origin, and nobody held that against him.

I am not whining. I don’t blame others. There is no anti-Lutheran pogrom afoot in the United States. Nobody keeps Lutherans out of politics deliberately, as there is nobody preventing Lutherans from reaching the most influential positions in journalism – nobody, that is, than Lutherans themselves.

But that’s not the Lutheran way. Lutherans are expected to follow the Augsburg Confession, which roundly condemns in article 16 “those who do not locate evangelical perfection in the fear of God and in faith, but place it in forsaking political office.”

Some Old Order Mennonites forbid political office to Christians. Well, they are entitled to their views. They don’t vote either, neither do they drink and make merry, go to the movies or laze around South Beach.

How come we don’t engage this warped postmodern world in which we live? How come we don’t face it head-on? Could it be that Lutherans don’t like dirtying their hands much in politics and in the major media, even though this is precisely what our theology tells us we should do?

Here’s a question for my fellow Lutherans: When did we all become Old Order Mennonites? I am not joking. Only eleven years short of the Reformation’s 500^th anniversary I seriously wonder how Lutheran we still are.

Comments

[Dr. Albert E. Jabs]

The Siemon-Netto article on Lutheran fears to take on the world (November-Lutheran Witness) really represents a tip of the iceberg. Who would not have fears in a world where the power of the media, in its daily resume of horror stories can dominate or even define our lives. The mistrust, fear, and hatred seem to slip in under the radar, and we under diagnose this battle, and without the Christ Resurrection Power, active in our lives, we all surrender to fear, and to the idols, which give false promises of deliverance.

The postmodern world is warped, by what Luther would call demons of deceit, daily dying, and the delusions of demons disguised as good stuff. In Luther's day, the plagues, like AIDS today, is spreading; the fanaticism of false religions threaten to burn our cities, like in his day; and death is so sanitized, that the Gospel, which can overcome, is unnecessitated, so that the demons of fear, mistrust, hatred, and confusion reign almost supreme. It is no wonder, that Lutherans, worry about all these IED's, going off in front of us, and in back of us, and so we succumb to the temptation of only going to church, and not allowing the Holy Spirit, to fight off the fears, and with God's help, to take on the world, like Luther, even in our fears. Luther's Sacristy prayer...had it right. "Lord, do not forsake us, for by ourselves, we bring it all to destruction."