LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Concordia Lutheran Seminary

54 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW XII
the “Reformed irenicists”, theologians in the Elector’s pay who were
prepared to deal gently with such enlightened Lutherans as were prepared to
give up the Real Presence in the Eucharist and the Christology of the genus
majestaticum. 14 All the way from John Sigismund to the Prussian Union of
the early 19 th century, the sentence once declared by pagan Rome, the
judgement spoken against Luther by Charles V, was repeated against the
loyal children of the Lutheran Reformation: Non licet esse vos, You have no
right to exist!
Most of nominal Lutheranism on the European continent has long since
been swallowed up hook, line and sinker into what Kurt Marquart describes
as the black hole of union with the Reformed. The Lutherans of North
Germany could at least plead in mitigation the brutal persecuting efforts of
the Hohenzollern State, but the nominal Lutherans of North America can
offer no such excuse. Two distinct models for being Lutheran have been
available since the early decades of the 19 th century. On the one hand, the
Hohenzollern paradigm was advocated with democratic wrappings by S. S.
Schmucker with his programme of “American Lutheranism”. Alas, the great
majority of North American Lutherans now unblushingly walk the path
signposted by Schmucker, which involves the wholesale surrender of the
second pattern of reformation in favour of some conflation of the third and
fifth patterns that emerged five centuries ago. On the other hand, the heirs of
Krauth and Walther and of Löhe’s Sendlinge find themselves at odds with
the prevailing religious culture as they confess Christ in partibus infidelium.
Even within the conservative Lutheran synods powerful forces would join
with the Hohenzollerns and Schmucker in hacking down the venerable
ecclesial tree with fivefold root. Our only justification for seeking the
conservation and flourishing of this tree is the conviction that the young
professor who issued his 95 Theses 483 years ago was faithful to Christ and
His Word as he sought to reconfigure the inter-relation of Scripture, office,
and rule/confession in the life of the Church. On this anniversary night we
may not indulge in cheap triumphalism, for all Western Christendom,
including our own, is currently gripped in deep crisis, engulfed in dreadful
desolation. Five centuries ago those who advocated all six patterns of
reformation were agreed that Almighty God is all-holy and His wrath to be
feared. As we now enter the fourth century of so-called Enlightenment, this
consensus has broken down so that even the religious forces active within
14 See the closing chapters of Nischan’s Prince, People, and Confession, and the same
writer’s Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate
Publishing Company, 1999) chapters 12 and 13. These meticulously researched volumes,
containing a wealth of otherwise inaccessible data and written from a bitterly anti-Lutheran
perspective, are must reading for all seminarians and clergy who care a fig for confessional
integrity!