LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

PITTELKO: HERMANN SASSE REVIEW 81
real presence that Sasse saw the challenge of Rome for the Lutheran Church.
Sasse believed that in spite of all heresies, in the liturgy the true Gospel was
preserved. Looking at the Roman Church, Sasse saw that it was in the
liturgy that true dogma was preserved, and thus addressing his own Church
he wrote, “There is no more damning an indictment of a theologian than to
say that he knows nothing about the liturgy.” In addition to the preservation
of the Gospel in the liturgy of the Roman Church, it is in the Sacrament of
the Altar that he saw even more clearly that the Gospel was preserved in
Rome. Sasse is not reluctant to take sides with Rome as far as the issue of
the Real Presence is concerned. He criticised the dogma of
transubstantiation because of its inherent rationalism, but not because it
expressed the doctrine of the Real Presence. While having a high regard for
liturgy and the Sacrament of the Altar in the Roman Church, Sasse did not
hesitate to believe that the old Lutheran doctrine that the pope was the
Antichrist was correct. This was not because of the life of the pope or his
personality, but rather because of the pope’s function and his doctrine. He
understood the papacy as man’s presumption of wanting to take God’s place
and identified this as the great error of the papacy. The papacy and the cult
of the Virgin Mary therefore belong closely together and came to coincide
in the pronouncement of the dogma of the Assumption in 1950. Sasse
believed that the doctrine of the Antichrist is a very serious topic for
ecumenical dialogue, although he did not believe that either Lutherans or
Roman Catholics were ready for that. Sasse believed that the Lutheran
Church had much to learn from Rome concerning the doctrine of Scripture.
He saw clearly the incredible mirroring of the radical change that had taken
place on the doctrine of Scripture. What Protestants and many Lutherans
had carelessly given up on one side, had been rediscovered by Rome on the
other side. While Sasse continued to have high regard for the Roman Church
and took seriously his dialogue with that Church, he came to the conclusion
that the dogmatic decay that he had seen in the Lutheran Church was also
alive and active in the Roman Catholic Church. He saw that churches live
by myths. Rome lived by the myth of the primacy of Peter and his
successors. Anglicans lived by the myth of “apostolic succession”.
Lutherans lived by the myths of being the church of the Reformation and the
three solas. But Sasse labelled them for what they were, myths. Dr Martens
suggests that Sasse’s comments on the Roman Church are a warning for the
Lutheran Church today.
Dr John R. Stephenson, general editor of the volume, also provides one
of the significant chapters as he discusses Sasse on “Holy Supper, Holy
Church” (224-39). Karl Barth and the Ecumenical Movement dominated the
theological world of the twentieth century. Sasse, who had first touched
Confessional Lutheranism through reading Wilhem Löhe while at a
Reformed Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, in the mid-nineteen twenties,