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| One of my talented friends created this Photoshop. |
People write to me about their frustration with the language of Lutheran leaders. I am not surprised. Mainline, liberal, apostate Christianity is a big business with an enormous vocabulary.
I did a lot of the reading when I had the time and eye-muscles to go through piles of books about modern theology. Notre Dame was heavily invested in liberal, rationalistic philosophies, with few exceptions. One Holy Cross priest was a traditionalist, and he had not real standing on the campus.
Still, everyone pretended to be talking about the Christian Faith when their favorite authors were pagans (Tillich), adulterers (Tillich, Barth), and plagiarists (Tillich, Barth). Someone wrote that Hans Kueng, famous German Catholic theologian, had his students write his books. He was suitably outraged.
Tillich stole his students' research and regurgitated it. Barth had people write helpful notes, which he included as his writing. Besides that amoeba-lke absorption of content , Karl Barth's hawt live-in mistress - Charlotte Kirschbaum - did the bulk of his research and writing.
Graduate students listen with awe to lectures about how one modernist is different from the rest, how they have fought with each other, but they have a common vocabulary.
The words and thoughts come from Halle University, fetid swamp of Universal Objective Justification. The history of ideas is difficult to track, but many will agree that Biblical, Lutheran doctrine was diluted and polluted by Calvinism, where the Spirit is divorced from the Word.
The Bible teaches the efficacy of the Word, so no one can legitimately divorce the work of the Holy Spirit from the Word of God. Therefore, those Roman Catholics, Calvinists, Babtists, and cultists who divorce the Spirit/Word combination are going to betray their loyalties through their vocabularies and authorities cited.
The Ohio Conference of WELS, Michigan franchise, let me give a paper on the Book of Concord and modern theological issues. Using Megatron, my database, I showed how WELS pronouncements were almost verbatim the insights of Fuller Seminary - where all the WELS-ELCA-LCMS leaders trained.
The conference had their quaint little custom of discussing and voting on a paper, normally routine. They refused to do that during the uproar. Once I resigned from WELS, the conference brought up the paper again (after the paper spread through WELS, faster than Johnsonville brats). Someone said, "You refused to discuss the paper when he was here. Now you want to discuss it in his absence?"
Haha.
Those fed from the Fuller teats are going to sound Fullerish whenever they speak and write. That is easy to track.
The same is true of Universal Objective Justification, which rejects:
- The Means of Grace
- Faith
- The efficacy of the Word
- The Spirit/Word union
- Justification by Faith
- The historic liturgy, yea even
- Luther, Melanchthon, Chemnitz.
Those who have no real Lutheran education - like Herman Otten, Waldo Werning (RIP), Jay Webber, Frosty Bivens, Paul Calvin Kelm, and Larry Olson - also show no evidence of a Lutheran vocabulary.
On the Church Growth side of this swamp, it is all
- Cell groups
- Demographics
- Entertainment evangelism
- Management by Objective
- Marketing
- Popcorn and soda
- Stages rather than worship areas
- Coaching rather than sermons, yea even
- Lousy rock bands rather than a pipe organ
Universal Objective Justification, which harmonizes so well with Church Growth, boasts this vocabulary -
- God has pronounced the world forgiven
- In Christ all were absolved when He rose
- Objective Justification
- Subjective Justification (but hardly ever Justification by Faith, which they hate)
- The Brief Statement of 1932
- The NIV, especially the Newest NIV
- Our beloved synod
- Our honored leaders from the past - but not Luther, ptui, ptui
- Our synodical essays, but not the Book of Concord, the Galatians Lectures of Luther, Luther, Chemnitz, or Melanchthon
