Tuesday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch revealed the grand faux pas with this somewhat ironic lede: “The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod recently carried out what various members consider the equivalent of a modern-day heresy trial.”
My enthusiasm is, of course, mixed with sadness. The Rev. Dr. Matthew Becker (the hero/victim of the breathlessly Hawthornean Post-Dispatch piece) has agitated against the church’s plainly worded doctrinal statements, to which he was bound, for many years, and should have been removed from the LCMS’s clergy roster a long time ago. Though he teaches at Valparaiso University, which is not affiliated with the LCMS, he has managed to maintain his status on the clergy roster, despite several previously unsuccessful attempts to remove him. Tuesday’s news is therefore a victory for orthodoxy. Nonetheless it is tragic to witness a man persisting in promoting false and harmful doctrine, and tragic to see him face the consequences. And yes, the rich etymology of tragic traces back to the Greek tragos, which means “goat,” and yes, the sheep needed to be separated from this one.
Read the rest here.
HT: Dr. Tighe
Some welcome news from our
Thanks for giving us in the LCMS this notice, John.
ReplyDeleteForgive me for quibbling, however, with this:
welcome news from our Reformed brothers and sisters
The LCMS is not a Reformed denomination, but a Lutheran one, and we Lutherans are at pains to distance ourselves from the Reformed branch (the heirs of Zwingli, Bullinger, and Calvin) of the Reformation. Such confusion between Lutheran and Reformed is (in the words of Orthodox Fr Gregory Roeber) "enough to set any confessional Lutheran's teeth on edge for a long, long time."
If Pastor Becker's errors were not related to women's ordination and Scriptural inerrancy, but instead consisted of agreement with the Reformed, his expulsion for heresy might well have come much more quickly.
I read a story recently about a church in Georgia that was promoting sodomy and it was attacked by Christians who vandalized the site, similar to the overturning of the money-changers tables.
ReplyDeleteRecognizing now that there is no political victory attainable, the victory should be to decapitate the weakest head of the hydra, that of 'Liberal Christianity'. This kind of Christianity, is heresy. How dare they use the name of the Holy Faith to spread the ideas of the political left! It is time to clean house, and drive out Liberal Christianity for good.
"The LCMS is not a Reformed denomination"
ReplyDeleteSome from the Orthodox perspective may consider any denomination from "The Reformation" as being reformed for that reason, not necessarily due to particular theology regarding free-will, predestination, etc.