Quote of the Day

We Lutherans have gathered like eagles round the carcase of cheap grace, and there we have drunk of the poison which has killed the life of following Christ.  It is true, of course, that we have paid the doctrine of pure grace divine honors unparalleled in Christendom, in fact we have exalted that doctrine to the position of God himself.   Everywhere Luther's formula has been repeated, but its truth perverted into self-deception.  So long as our Church holds the correct doctrine of justification, there is no doubt whatever that she is a justified Church!  So they said, thinking that we must vindicate our Lutheran heritage by making this grace available on the cheapest and easiest terms.  To be 'Lutheran' must mean that we leave the following of Christ to legalists, Calvinists, and enthusiasts - and all this for the sake of grace.  We justified the world, and condemned as heretics those who tried to follow Christ.  The result was that a nation became Christian and Lutheran, but at the cost of true discipleship.  The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap.   Cheap grace had won the day.

But do we also realize that this cheap grace has turned back upon us like a boomerang?  The price we are having to pay to-day in the shape of the collapse of the organized Church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost.  We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition.  Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving.  We poured forth unending streams of grace.  But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.  Where were those truths which impelled the early Church to institute the catechumenate, which enabled a strict watch to be kept over the frontier between the Church and the world, and afforded adequate protection for costly grace?  What had happened to all those warnings of Luther's against preaching the gospel in such a manner as to make men rest secure in their ungodly living?  Was there ever a more terrible or disastrous instance of the Christianizing the world than this?  What are those three thousand Saxons put to death by Charlemagne compared with the millions of spiritual corpses in the country to-day?  

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Quote of the Day

…there is a fact that we must never forget; namely that the Reformers are not our masters:  "One is our Master, even Christ."  Luther held opinions which would shock the feelings of Episcopalians, of Baptists, or Presbyterians, or of all together…  The writings of Luther do not make part of the Bible; and he declares himself that he does not wish men to believe in him, but only in Christ.  We must understand the vast difference between the most eminent doctors - Augustine, Wickliffe, Luther, Calvin, Crammer - and the word of God.

 

Jean Henri Merle D'aubigne

Quote of the Day

Have we - I speak to those of us who are committed Christians - have we forgotten that God's power is more clearly seen in the message of the Cross than in any political or social plan we might devise?  Might not our search for some antidote to our grevious ills be symptomatic of our lost confidence in the power of the gospel to change people from the inside out?  Do we cling to the cross with the deep conviction that it is not simply a part of our message to the world, but rightly understood it is the whole of it?.....In an effort to be "relevant" we now face the temptation of being diverted from our mission and becoming involved doing what is good while bypassing what is best….

Our Two Dangers

In our desperate moment in history we face two dangers.  The first is to say that we must retreat from our cultural and political battles to be true to the supremacy of the cross.  This view point is right in emphasizing that our primary mission is to preach the gospel, but it fails because we end up preaching to ourselves…Those older fundamentalists were right in holding to the centrality of the Christian message but wrong in teaching that he Christian faith could be lived in isolation from the culture and its institutions.  Thus the cross, though exalted among the faithful, was hidden from the world.

The second danger is that we become so overburdened with social/political agendas that our message is lost amid these cultural skirmishes.  The church has always faced the temptation to modify the gospel or make it secondary to a given political, philosophical, or cultural agenda.  When this happens, Christians have exposure to the culture, but the cross does not.  Again hidden.

Jacques Ellul, in The Subversion of Christianity, wrote, "Each generation thinks it has finally discovered the truth…Christianity becomes an empty bottle that successive cultures fill with all kinds of things."  Regrettably, the Christian bottle has been filled with many different agendas.  Early in the history of the church, the Cross was obscured by sacramentalism, the idea that salvation was a grace given through the rituals of the church.  Salvation was not longer a personal relationship with God, but was reduced to partnership with the ecclesiastical structure.  The bottle w was emptied and filled with liturgy that could never bring a soul to God.  The Cross became an ornament hung around the neck, not an instrument that changed the heart.

Rationalism and humanism arose in the eighteenth century, the fruits of the Enlightenment.  Religion, it insisted, must conform to our understanding.  Whatever seemed contrary to our sensibilities was eliminated.  Miracles, for example, were discounted as being out of sync with the enlightened cultural mind - set.  The Unitarians argued that God was too good to send man to hell, and the Universalists believed man was too good to be sent there.  The Cross became a symbol of sentimental love, not the means by which Christ shed His blood to reconcile men to God.

Today the bottle of Christianity is often filled with physiology.  Since Freud, the need for a religious conversion has been eliminated.  Secular psychology denies that man fell from some previous state of holiness.  Since he has not fallen, he has no need to be picked up, at least not by God.  Salvation is simply a matter of having a healthy self-image.  The cross of Christ is a symbol of man's alienation from himself; a reminder that man must be reconciled to who he already is.

The New Age movement, in combining Christianity with any number of Eastern/occultic ideas ignores the Cross altogether.  At best it is a symbol of self-awareness, a reminder of our need to get in touch with the world beyond us.  According to this movement the Cross does not humiliate us; it exalts us.

Some political activists have filled the Christian bottle with a strategy for political reform.  Salvation, it appears, is electing conservatives to national and local office.  Important though this might be, we must always remember that God is neither Republican nor Democrat.  When the Cross is wrapped in the flag of a political party, it is always distorted or diminished.  Even for some who have experienced its power, the Cross has become an addendum to what is thought to be more pressing agendas.

……Ultimately the ballot box cannot save us; only God can.  And the Cross is the centerpiece of His agenda.  Only when the Cross stands alone, unencumbered with other religions, philosophies, or political ideologies, does it retain its power.

Erwin Lutzer