What Does it Mean to Be Lutheran?
From LutheranWiki
This is the title of a somewhat obscure work, first published in Germany in 1934 as, Was heißt lutherisch?[1] It was written by the Lutheran theologian Hermann Sasse (1895-1976). Who was Hermann Sasse? Sasse, like many of his fellow theologians of that day, was educated in 19th century theological trends by such luminaries as Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) and Karl Holl (1866-1926) at the University of Berlin from 1913 to 1916. Military service as a common infantryman in World War I (1914-1918), on the Western Front, in Flanders and France, proved to be just as much a seminal event in his life as it proved to be—whether they participated in the conflict or not—for other theological contemporaries such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) and Karl Barth (1886-1968), who came to define what is known as Neo-Orthodoxy, and pre-eminent authors of the 20th Century such as the German Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front),[2] the Brits J. R. R. Tokien (The Lord of the Rings) and C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia), and even the American Ernest Hemmingway (Farewell to Arms).
Sasse’s reaction to his experiences in World War I was to participate in a myriad of ecumenical endeavors (Faith and Order (1927), the Lutheran World Convention (1923, 1929, and 1935), British-German Conference of Theologians) in the partial hope that such a disasterous occurrence would never happen again. When confronted with the ecclesiastical situation in German during the rise to prominance of National Socialism (the Nazi party), however -- specifically the fact that the German Evangelical Church Federation of 1922 was desolved and a single unified German Evangelical Church (GEK) of Lutheran, Reformed and Union churches established (1933) -- Sasse, having become professor of church history in Erlangen that same year, found that he could not sign the most significant theological response to the Nazi sponsered GEK, the Barmen Declaration (1934), penned by Barth. The Barmen Declaration was also an attempt to achieve such a church union between Lutherans and Reformed, but one free of the horrid nationalistic and racist ideology of National Socialism and the neo-pagan theology of the "faith-movement" German Christians.
This was no rash decission on Sasse’s part. He himself had attended the meetings which led to Barmen, and earlier had worked closely towards a timely and faithful confession with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, resulting in the Bethel Confession of August 1933. By not signing Barmen, however, Sasse was destined to be confined to footnotes of doctoral dissertations, and a process was set in motion which eventually led to Sasse’s voluntary theological exile from Germany in 1949, to Australia, where he remained until his death in 1976.
In that the Barmen Declaration has now been integrated into the theological foundation of not only the union of the Protestant churches in Germany, but the union of many Protestant churches in the United States, the question is asked: What did Sasse have in mind when, in the same year he refused to sign Barmen, he penned, What Does it Mean to Be Lutheran? The first section of the work leads us into his thought process. There one finds listed three common mis-interpretations of the Lutheran Reformation which held sway at that time, and for all intents and purposes, still hold sway even yet today in the hearts and minds of people all over the world, thereby confining Luther's Reformation to simply be ignored in contemporary theological discussions:
1. The Heroic Interpretation: The Lutheran Refomation was an event based upon the writings of the hero, the genius, the great man, Martin Luther; To understand the Reformation, one must understand the man Luther “his thoughts, his purposes, his inner struggles, and his development;
2. The Culture-Historical Interpretation: The Lutheran Reformation was the great event in the history of the civilizations of the world, that turning point in European history, that dawn of a new cultural epoch, in which man was emancipated “from the bonds of obscurantism into which Christianity, and all culture with it, had fallen”; and
3. The Nationalistic Interpretation: The Lutheran Reformation is a German event, THE German-defining event, in which the descendants of ancient German tribes finally were able to throw off the the remnants of Imperial Rome, the yoke of Roman Catholicism, based in Italy.
Sasse’s position: From the point of view of the reality of the church on earth, these three interpretations of the Lutheran Reformation fall short for although each possesses a kernal of truth, they are not true, and simply allow the Lutheran Reformation to be marginalized as a non-theological event. On the contrary, so Sasse, the Lutheran Reformation, “in the strictest sense of the word, was an event in the history of the church, an event which the church of Christ experienced in the course of its history.” The Reformation was truly an “epoch-making [event] in the history of the church. And it is only as such an event that its character can be understood.”
As an event in the history of the church then, what is the substance of the Lutheran Reformation? Can it simply be forgotten in the drive for outward ecclesiastical unity or uncritical political-cultural relevance?
That substance needs to be the essence of the Lutheran Church yet today and is the interest of LutheranWiki.
[edit] Notes
- ↑ First published in English in 1938 in a translation by Theodore Tappert (New York: Harper & Bros, ISBN 0 85910 081 2) under the title Here We Stand; published again by the Lutheran Publishing House of Australia in 1979.
- ↑ Listen to a 2007 radio discussion of this book.
