Those Curious Lutherans
The Comforts of Northfield Theology
by S. M. Hutchens
It had been one of the failed intentions of the Touchstone editorial staff to send a representative to the yearly conference in Northfield, Minnesota, sponsored by the Center for Evangelical and Catholic Theology, publisher of the highly regarded journal Pro Ecclesia. The conference in June 1998 was “Sin, Death, and the Devil.” Since I am the editor who is supposed to “know Lutherans” and was available on the conference days, I was accordingly sent northwesterly, to somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Wobegon.
Despite the confidence of my fellow editors, I must confess I have always found the workings of the Lutheran theological mind rather foreign and uncongenial to my own. The best I am able to describe it, despite my years of training among Lutherans, is with the generalization that Lutheranism, for complex reasons having to do with its history, ethnic character, and the personality of its founder, is suspended between conceptions of the gospel as world-affirming freedom and world-resisting form, and in a peculiarly Lutheran way that is difficult for non-Lutherans to understand.
The Lutheran Tilt
It appears to me that Lutherans tend to see the fundamental polarity of Christian struggle not so much in terms of orthodoxy against heterodoxy or conservative against liberal as through an antithesis of law and gospel. This has worked itself out into something that looks, from the outside, very much like liberals versus conservatives—in the United States, the ELCA on the left, the Missouri and Wisconsin Synods prominent on the right—but the language and thought behind both schools or tendencies is decidedly Lutheran. On one side are those who hold to Lutheranism as defined in its confessions, sometimes with a rigor I have heard described as “Prussianism.” To these the gospel as rediscovered by Luther is principally a matter of dogmatic and sacramental recovery from Roman Catholicism and separation from Calvinism and the Protestant sects. It was the kind I first encountered in the writings of Franz Pieper and J. T. Mueller. On the other side are those who emphasize Luther’s rediscovery of evangelical freedom, but they vary rather widely in what they mean by the term. They range from disciplined Melancthonians to truly bizarre worldlings. Finding a place between these opposing, but still distinctively Lutheran groups is difficult, since each tends to define true Lutheranism or “evangelical Catholicism” in terms of being not like the other, or anybody else.
Justification sola fide serves as a rallying cry, but to the confessional Lutheran it tends to mean anti-works-righteousness, practiced within the inherited forms of Lutheranism, while to the liberal it stands for freedom from law as defined by progressivist canons. Each draws a strong dark line between law and gospel, but does not agree on where one leaves off and the other begins. Charges that the other is threatening to throw the faithful back under the law’s bondage, one by mistaking law for gospel and the other by indulging in sin and error, are frequent and plausible. The opposition, or at least apposition, of law and gospel is at the heart of the essential Lutheran dogmatic and ethical dilemma as I understand it. It is a problem inherited directly from Luther himself.
One is reminded of the movement of a ball bearing on a tilting board. The nature of the polarity of gospel-as-Lutheran-freedom (i.e., liberal Lutheranism) and gospel-as-Lutheran-form (i.e., conservative Lutheranism) is that although the tilt may be slight, it is enough to move the ball and keep it firmly on one side or the other. Those who manage the considerable feat of maintaining the gradient near zero degrees between freedom and form are, perhaps, the most balanced Lutherans, but are confronted on this plane with the question of exactly what criterion they are using to avoid slipping into dogmatism on the one hand or antinomianism on the other. It appears that many of these Northfield Lutherans are held on course by a vision of the Church with an other-than-Lutheran center that Lutherans are bound to seek, less to converse with as equals than to submit to.
An Ecumenical Seriousness
There was a sense here of emergence into something like a discovery that in the Church there is both freedom and form in abundance, and they do not contradict each other any more than law and gospel do. To those who are coming under this impression, ecumenical activity is not simply a Christian duty or a convivial summer pastime for academics and pastors, but chiefly a lifeline. One expects ecumenical gatherings such as that at Northfield to take the form of Lutherans telling other Christians “how they see it,” then listening to the responses in hopes of reaching an understanding that leaves the convictions of both intact—ecumenical dialogue as usually practiced, and not necessarily a bad thing. The Northfield conference did not, however, sound like that at all, but rather seemed to be based on a prior and fairly refined intuition among the participants of an existing ecumenical consensus, and willingness, in fact eagerness, to hear what other Christians with a reputation for orthodoxy and wisdom might have to say to the Lutherans—and the vast majority were Lutherans—who were gathered there.
Too many meetings of this type cancel their ecumenical quality at the outset by requiring participants to put up with the offense of female clergy, the church-dividing and chilling effect of which on ecumenical relations cannot be overestimated. Although some women pastors were present, I saw none in clerical garb. The prayers were led by a male chaplain who followed traditional forms. Despite the conviction of many of those present that women may be properly ordained to pastoral ministry, women as pastors were not forced upon the gathering—a sign of ecumenical seriousness. It would also appear that over the years this conference has developed a reputation for being a less than satisfying venue for people who wish to re-imagine Lutheranism—which may be simply to say that its organizers insist on remaining serious about Christian theology.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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