By James Burtness
I want to thank you for the work that you do in the Fellowship of Confessional Lutherans (FOCI,)- It's extremely important.
I decided to call this little presentation "Doing Everything in the Name of the Lord Jesus" (Colossians 3: 17). Colossae was a Christian congregation, but it didn't get things quite right. These people thought that God and the world were separated by intermediary beings, and that Jesus was one such. Jesus was divine to the Colossians, but not "God of God, Light of light, True God of True God," as we say in our Nicene Creed every Sunday.
So everything was in confusion, and Paul, in writing to them, decided no! to argue the point but simply to proclaim Jesus Christ. He said, "All things were made in, through and for Christ. All things hold together in Christ. Everything is reconciled to God by the blood of Christ's cross." (Col.l: 15-20).
Then Paul says, "Whatever you do, do it because everything holds together in Christ. Do everything you do in the name of the Lord Jesus." That's our theme.
An Important Word
You are the Fellowship of Confessional Lutherans. Confessional – It's an important word. I want to say something about that word and about the situation today in which we are called upon to confess the name of Jesus.
The Greek word for "confess" is homologeo. It means to speak together, to say the same word. Confession is something the Church says corporately. It's very important for the testimony and life of our Church to ''say the same word." In our common worship we hear, "Let us confess our sin;" and "Let us confess our faith."
We "speak together" the word of repentance, we confess our sins. We speak together the word of faith, the response to our sinfulness. I think the Lutheran Church is beginning to catch on to how important that term "confession" is – maybe, partly, because of your work in FOCL.
At Luther .Seminary we have a series of courses under the theme, "Interpreting and Confessing." We "interpret" in order to confess, lo confess our sin, and to confess our faith. In every Lutheran Church of which I've been a part, the constitution says something about allegiance to the Scriptures and to the Confessions. We've used those two together. They "interpret" one another. And we have traditionally said that both arc normative for our faith and life as Lutherans.
We know what's normative because it's set forth in the Scriptures and Confessions. They are both normative but we have a made adistinction. We have said that the Scriptures are the "norming norm" and the Confessions are the "normed norm." That is, if pushcomes to shove we Lutherans go with the Scriptures, although we do believe the Confessions and the Scriptures are in harmony.
Lutherans then talk about the Formal Principle of the Reformation, i.e., the primary, the final authority of Scripture. They speak also about the Material Principle of the Reformation, namely, justification by grace alone through faith. These also are ways for expressing the richness and themany textured character of that wonderful word confession.
Biblical Confession
The word "confess" starts in the New Testament. PaulsaysinRomans 10:9,"Ifyou confess with your lipsùI want to hear it, Paul says, it's not something you keep inside. I want to hear itù-if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved!"
Philippians 2 looks forward to the "time whenever)' knee will bend and every tongue – again, let me hear it, – every tongue confess, that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God, the Father."
According to I Corinthians 12, thepeoplc were all upset about various spiritual gifts. They were fighting about it, and wrole lo Paul, "Who's right?" Paul wrote back. "Lets get this straight. No one says Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit; and no one saysùlet me hear it, move yourlips now – no one can say that Jesus is cursed, if he has the Holy Spirit." The test of the presence of the Holy Spirit, Paul says, in 1 Corinthians: 12-14, is not ecstatic, but confessional. The earliest Chrislian confession was "Jesus is Lord," the way of finding out whether you're aChristian or not.
Also for us. We tell who is Christian, not by chasing after a person and finding out what his or her behavior is, although behavior is not unimportant. We find out by hearing the confession, "Jesus is Lord."
That confession was heard wonderfully in the early church, because the Roman Emperor demanded that people say. "Caesar is Lord." Caesar claimed to be God. For a Christian Gcnlilclo say, "Jesus isLord" meant exaclly that; Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord. No one said that lightly.
Also for the Christian Jew. For him the word, "God" carried God's presence. When the Jew saw God's name "Jehovah" in print, he felt that the name bore the presence of God to such an extent that it would be wrong to put that holy name on human sinful lips. So when the Jew saw the word "God," he substituted the word "Lord.''For the Christian Jew to say "Jesus is Lord," meant that Jesus was one with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. No Jew said that lightly, either.
Confession was very much tied lo the particular time and circumstances in which Christianity arose. That's why Paul can say, "If you confess (both Jew and Greek) wilh your lips thai Jesus is Lord, and you believe in your heart God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved."
The word confess is a verb. It's something we do, we do together. We confess our sin. We confess our faith. We confess that Jesus is Lord.
Confessing the Creeds
Later came the Apostles' Creed, whose Second Article is about Jesus. The Creed's doctrine of the Trinity is essentially a Christ-centered doctrine. When we confess our faith in the words of the creed we are confessing "Jesus is Lord'" in an expanded way.
A person by the name of Arius (256-336 AD) began lo proclaim a very different doctrine. He said that while God exists, there are also many kinds of divine beings, such as angels, and including Jesus. Jesus is divine. But not quite equal with the real God. So Arius said about Jesus, "There was a lime when he was not."
Christians responded, "That doesn't square with what the Bible says: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God' (John 1:1). Something is wrong here!" Athanasias, the Patriarch of Alexandria, took Arius on. To combat Arius' heresy, the Nicene Creed was hammered out in 325 AD, confessing that "Jesus is Lord." So we confess that Creed each Sunday, acknowledging "Jesus is God of God. Light of light, Very God of Very God, begotten yes, hut not made, being of one substance with (he Father, by whom all things were made." Confession is a verb. We do it in particular limes, and in particular contexts, in particular ways.
By the 16th century, the Doctrine of the Trinity was fairly well established and there was no real argument between Luther and Rome as to whether God is Triune. Instead, the argument had to do with salvation by works or by grace. Accordingly, \heLuihcranAugsburg Confession moves quickly to Article 2, Original Sin. If you're going to explain grace and salvation, you have to talk about sin, not about the nature of God.
The final confessional statement about what Lutherans believe. The Formula of Concord (1580 AD) dealt especially with the controversy over the doctrine of "Justification through Faith." Exactly how and why are we made right with God ("justified")? Lutherans said that with this doctrine the Church stands or falls. That was true in the 16th century and it's true today, even though we're not living in exactly the same time, nor undergoing exactly the same crisis that those people were.
Another confessional turning point came with Adolph Hitler. So-called "German-Christians" arose who really hyphenated Nazism with Christianity. People like Dietrich Bonhoeffcr, Martin Nicmoeller, and KarlBarth said it was a time for confessing the name of Jesus clearly. They formed a group called the Confessing Church. They said, "Today, the Anti-Christ is not in Rome. Today the Anti-Christ is in Berlin." They staled their beliefs in the Barmen Confession (1934), an extremely Chris to-centric document.
Confession – we find it all the way through the life of the Church, and for all kinds of reasons. As Christians, it's something we do and should do, even today.
A Failure of Nerve
So, where are we today? I think the primary crisis in thechurch at large today is the failure of nerve about the centrality of Jesus Christ. That's the crisis.
It oozes up all over the place especially through New Ageism. Jesus Christ is being pushed out as the center of the Church.
The really frightening thing about this is, it is being done by very, very serious, respected people who do theology and who ought to know better. I hate to mention these names because some of these people are my friends. James Gustafson, for instance, chose to entitle his great final work, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective. Sounds good! Let's go for God. That's a Reformation theme.
Theocentric, for James Gustafson, however, turns out not to be Christocentric. He says that Christocentricily is just another way of talking about an thropo-centricity. Jesus of Nazareth is another human being and we can’t make him the center of our thought. We have to make God the center.
The Bible becomes, in Gustafson's hands, only the charter document of the Christian movement. But the "charter document of the Christian movement" is a long way from being the Word of God. When we read Ihc Bible, we have to practice "the hermeneutics of selective retrieval", says Gustafson.
That means you can relieve some good stuff from those documents, but you have to be very careful. You also find some good stuff in the Koran, some good stuff in the Bahagda-Vcdas, some good stuff in the Bible. Mix it up and you get theo-centricity. Of course, there's a lot of junk in the Bible that you don't retrieve, he adds, so you just leave that behind. Suddenly the whole of the Confessions is down the drain.
Recently John Cobb gave two lectures entitled "Jesus to Chrisl" and "From Christ to God." Sounds great. Jesus the Christ, the one who leads us to God. Sounds great – except that's not what he meant.
He meant, go from Jesus of Nazareth to the idea of Christ. And it turns out that for Cobb, the idea of Christ means whatever is supremely important. It's a kind of getting to God without Jesus and without Christ. Jesus is being shoved off the center.
Then we have Krister Stendahl, a former Lutheran Bishop of Sweden, spoke to the American Academy of Religion about Christianity and religious pluralism. He said that we have to have a Copernican revolution, whereby we move from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe. Stcndahl said, "We Christians have had Christ at the center of the universe, but we need a revolution so that God is at the center of the universe." Then Christ is one of the many planets out there along with Buddha and Krishna and so on. When he got through everybody clapped. How sad.
No Other God
This is a failure of nerve about the centrality of Jesus Chrisl, even among fine Christian people. They have soaked up the nonsensical ooze of this New Age Religion, and suddenly, Christ is off to the side, and they still think that some how or other they're going to find God.
Christians know no God other than in the person of Jesus Christ. That this is throughout the New Testament. My suggestion is that in our time and in our place we look again to our confession and if we are losing our nerve about the centrality of Jesus Christ then we ought to read ColossiansandEphesians. There Paul just hammers it home. "He is the first born of all creation, the first born from the dead. In Him all things were made, in heaven and on earth, principalities, powers, authorities, all things were made through Him. And in Him all things hold together. He is the head of the church, the Beginning and the End. All things are reconciled to God through Him, all things in the universe."
A Christocentric universe, reconciled to God through the blood of his crossùthat is the message of the Lutheran Confessions, and indeed, it is a confession from which we too must never waver.