The Lord’s Inheritance
If you are at all plugged into what is going on outside of Lutheran circles, you have undoubtedly seen news related to the surge of thirty-five and under young people (particularly young men) who are coming back to church… or exploring the faith for the first time.
But they are not just showing up at any church. These young people have done their homework. There is no societal or family expectation from their religiously milquetoast parents that they be in church, and a high percentage of their friends are involved in neo-paganism or the various identity categories that serve a religious function in the lives of their adherents. No, they have come to the end of all that or else they have sensed as much as deducted that something is radically wrong with the world they inhabit.
When they show up at the doorsteps of the church, they have already “deconstructed” the secular, progressive faith into which they were catechized by both their education and the liturgical cycle of television, YouTube, and social media, for they have experienced its devastating fruits in either their own lives or the lives of those they love. By the time they warm a pew for the first time, they may know more about the controversy regarding whether and when the exodus happened, the debates at the Council of Nicaea II, or the history of the Reformation than the pastor preaching to them remembers or maybe ever knew.
While they may know they need spiritual formation and are hungry for such, while the pastor or any experienced Christian may quickly discern how partial or narrow their autodidactic catechesis has been, they are mostly not showing up the way people showed up at church a generation ago did. They are not seeking a vague “spirituality,” to “teach their kids morals,” or “doing what comes naturally” once the halcyon days of their twenties are over and it is time to “settle down.” They have gagged on the modernist Kool-Aid and are seeking an emetic to get the toxins out of their system.
So, they are seeking out orthodoxy and orthopraxy. To the consternation and frustration of theological progressives everywhere, these people are seeking out Latin mass and Eastern Rite catholic parishes, vital Orthodox congregations, and traditionalist Protestant communities. Popular YouTube theologian Jordan Cooper has done some reflecting on why such people seem more drawn to Anglicanism than Lutheranism,[1] but I think his reflections miss one key point; Lutheranism defines itself—at least in part—over and against the very thing these young people are looking for… tradition.
Because of our polemical family history (recounted each autumn as Reformation Sunday rolls around), we emphasize theological and Biblical argument rather than the reception of a precious, historical (and so immutable) heritage.
This need not be so. I am not here proposing that we should downplay our history or heritage, but rather that we should tell the whole story. The Reformation may have settled upon the material principle of the Reformation as justification by grace alone (sola gratia) through faith alone (sola fide) and the formal principle of the Reformation as revelation through Scripture alone (sola Scriptura), but the hermeneutic principle that brought the Reformers to these conclusions was ad fontes—back to the sources. The Lutheran Reformation in particular was an attempt to recover what had been lost, restore what had become corrupt, and expose again the foundation upon which all later Christian theology was built. It does not take much time with the Church Fathers to discover that as they debated the doctrines that would later be deemed the dogmas of the faith, they used the canonical Scriptures to justify their positions. That must mean that the Scriptures were more fundamentally authoritative than the theologians (however exalted intellectually or hierarchically) who interpreted them… Sola Scriptura.
As Martin Chemnitz pointed out beautifully, the Lutheran Reformation was not ultimately about rejectionof tradition, but rejection of authority that made claims contrary to the canonical Scriptures that were in reality the beating heart of the Christian tradition.
“How may I inherit eternal life?” asked the young rich man of Jesus. As modern scholarship has clearly shown, the Jews of Jesus’s day did not feel burdened by the Law, not desperate to “earn their salvation” by their obedience to it—that was the peculiar pathology of the Roman Catholicism Luther later encountered. No, the Jews of Jesus’s time viewed the salvation of the Lord and the means by which they received it (by definition, means of grace) as a precious inheritance to be received from God through their forebears.
Wise Christians should do the same. A principle of the medieval theology from which Lutheranism sprang was that we—whoever and whenever “we” happen to be—are “dwarves standing upon the shoulders of giants.” While certainly they were sinners who got some things wrong and whose ideas would consequentially need to be corrected by consulting “the sources” of the Christian tradition (preeminently the Scriptures) just as our descendants will need to correct us, what they passed faithfully far surpassed the mistakes they made.
While he ended his life in Orthodoxy, Church historian Jaroslav Pelikan was a Lutheran when he penned his most famous line; “Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” Lutherans should embrace the tradition of which we are a part and honor the theology—and practices—of our forebears in more than words, by inhabiting them, practicing them, and making them our own.
There is more to be said about how traditional congregations (and the kind of people who probably read the Lutheran CORE newsletter) can lean into the evangelism opportunities of this historical moment by “living out loud” as who they actually are, but for now, the chief thing is to remember that at its heart, the Lutheran Reformation is not against the Christian tradition, but receives it as the Lord’s inheritance to His people.
[1] https://youtu.be/iRXi6rQxTtQ?si=Bpm8A7543EAmuhre
