A Lutheran Vice-President?

Last updated on: August 9, 2024 at 6:04 pm By Gene Veith

Kamala Harris’s vice presidential running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, is a Lutheran. If he is elected, he would be either the first or second Lutheran to hold that high office. Fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, the vice president under Lyndon Johnson, had been Lutheran, but then joined a Methodist church after his family moved to a community without a Lutheran congregation.

Walz is quite open about his church affiliation, often describing himself as a “Minnesota Lutheran.” This will doubtless attract attention to the rest of us Lutherans, but those of us with a confessional theology will need to get used to explaining that we are not that kind of Lutheran.

Walz is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), which is a mainline liberal Protestant denomination, much like all the others. “But his church has ‘evangelical’ in its name, so doesn’t that mean he is evangelical?” No, “evangelical” is another name for “Lutheran,” just as “Reformed” is another name for “Calvinist.” In this context, “evangelical” has no connection with American evangelicalism.

Walz belongs to Pilgrim Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation in St. Paul. Some ELCA congregations are more conservative than others, but Pilgrim is as radical as they come.

According to an article in the Daily Caller on the subject by Robert Schmad, “Materials published by Pilgrim Lutheran Church instruct parishioners not to refer to God using male pronouns, push congregants to support reparation funds, encourage them to celebrate Ramadan and include a modified gender-neutral version of the Lord’s Prayer.”

Pilgrim Lutheran Church also takes a liberal stance on issues of sexuality and gender by sending its members to march at gay pride parades, working to amplify the “voices of women and nonbinary/gender non-conforming individuals,” having gender-neutral restrooms and celebrating “coming out day,” among other initiatives.

Saying that the “a patriarchal culture gave birth to the writing of scripture and the selection of the canon,” Pilgrim issued guidelines for gender-inclusive language for God. Their version of the Lord’s Prayer begins like this: ““Our Guardian, Our Mother, Our Father in heaven.”

I’m glad that the Daily Caller article distinguished between the ELCA and the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod by quoting Jonah Wendt, a policy advisor for former Vice President Mike Pence and a member of the LCMS. “The ELCA is, broadly speaking, a liberal American mainline Protestant denomination,” he said. “They reject the inerrancy of scripture, ordain women to the pastoral office [and] hold what many would believe to be unbiblical views on abortion and homosexual behavior.”

And yet, according to the congregation’s website, Pilgrim used to be LCMS! But they left the synod with the Seminex walkout of 1974, a schism whose 50th anniversary we mark this year. The congregations like Pilgrim that left, mainly over the issue of Biblical inerrancy, formed the American Evangelical Lutheran Church (AELC), which in turn became a catalyst for a union of the other liberal Lutheran synods into the ELCA.

Tim Walz has another connection with the LCMS. Governor Walz, a zealous COVID shutdown enforcer, issued a decree forbidding churches from holding worship services. But the Minnesota district of the LCMS joined forces with the Minnesota Catholic Conference to defy the governor’s order. Two days after the confessional Lutherans and the Catholics issued a statement to that effect, Gov. Walz backed down and rescinded his order.

Photo: Tim Walz, Office of Governor Tim Walz & Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Is America an Idea or a People?

Last updated on: August 2, 2024 at 8:38 pm By Gene Veith

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After World War II and during the Cold War, it was commonly said that America is not a nation based on ethnicity, as in the European nations, nor on race, as in the recently defeated Fascist nations. Rather, America is based on ideas as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution with its Bill of Rights. America is defined by its principles of freedom, equality, individualism, and democracy. America consists of people from all ethnicities, races, and national backgrounds who have come to these shores seeking these principles and the opportunities they make possible,

When I was in school in the olden days, we actually had classes in “Americanism,” studying those principles as opposed to the collectivism, tyranny, and state control of Communism. Yes, these Cold War lessons were in the context of America’s mortal struggle with the Soviet Union, but they were not just propaganda. Nor were they the property of just conservatives. These convictions were foundational to the Civil Rights movement and insured its success among the general public. Even today, legal immigrants must pass a test to demonstrate their knowledge of America and its principles as a pre-requisite of citizenship.

Now, though, there is a counter-movement that maintains that America should be thought of as a culture, an ethnicity, a distinct people with a common history. The National Conservatives, Christian or otherwise, tend to think in these terms, as do the conservative intellectuals of the “post-liberal” or “illiberal” school of thought. J. D. Vance alluded to this in his acceptance speech as Republican candidate for the vice-president when he said, “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

Fred Bauer discusses this controversy in his post for National Review entitled America beyond Ideas. And he shows that it’s not as simple as it might appear. If being an American involves believing in the principles stated in the Declaration of Independence, can’t atheists–who do not believe there is a Creator to endow inalienable rights– be Americans? I would counter Bauer’s point by saying that, yes, they can be, because the Constitution guarantees them freedom of religion. They would presumably not be Americans in the Integralists’ dream of America as a Catholic principality. Nor would they likely fit in with the communitarians’ organic societies, though Americanism would protect their individualism.

America as an idea allows and protects differences. America as a “people” values unity, and in so doing favors conformity and is oriented to tribalism. Perhaps that’s part of our problem. America is not a unified culture and is not a tribe, so its various factions consider themselves to be the true tribe and must be in conflict with the others. Our motto is e pluribus unum, “out of many, one,”–a unity of diverse individuals made possible by our common commitment to our Constitutional order.

Bauer is worried that thinking of America in terms of a set of ideas is too rigid and exclusionary. People disagree on what constitutes an “inalienable right,” for example, and Bauer laments the “volleys of excommunication” that constitutes so much of our political discourse. (Bauer cites President Biden’s dismissal of “MAGA Republicans” for allegedly not believing in the Constitution and being “a threat to this country.”)

But thinking of America as the land of liberty and individual rights allows for such discussions and prevents people from being excommunicated for their opinions. A nation consisting of a single community, though, is rigid and exclusionary. You are either in or out. You belong or you do not. Biden thinks MAGA Republicans are “a threat,” so he does not respect them and he considers them to be “other” than himself and his group. That’s communitarian talk. That’s not Americanism, though Americanism would allow Biden, like MAGA Republicans, to have their say.

Photo: Nisei War Memorial, Seattle, by Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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The Future of Our Political Parties

Last updated on: August 2, 2024 at 5:33 pm By Gene Veith

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What will happen to American political parties after one of them wins and the other one loses the upcoming presidential election?

Natan Ehrenreich has a provocative theory. Call it winning by losing. He has written an article for National Review entitled How the Losing Party in This Election Could End Up Controlling the Next Era of American Politics. It’s behind a paywall, but here is his argument. . . .

If Harris loses and Trump wins, that would mean the end of woke identity politics in the Democratic Party, while Republicans would double down on Trumpism. In that event, a sane-seeming, FDR-JFK-LBJ kind of old-school pro-American liberalism would easily beat the next generation of Trump-style Republicans, setting up an “era” of success for the Democrats.

Conversely, if Harris wins and Trump loses, that would mean the end of Trumpism in the Republican Party, while Democrats would double down on woke identity politics. In that event, a sane-seeming Eisenhower-Reagan limited government conservatism would easily beat the next generation of woke Democrats, setting up an “era” of success for Republicans.

Thus, whatever party loses the next election will be in a position to dominate American politics for a long time.

If this were to be true, Republicans should be voting for Democrats and Democrats should be voting for Republicans. I see some other problems with this hypothesis.

First of all, it assumes that the losing party would purge its ranks of the losing ideology. But party leaders are pretty entrenched. And both the leadership and the base of both parties are populated with ideologues who would rather be ideologically pure than win elections. Otherwise, why not shift their party’s message now?

Also, Ehrenreich assumes that neither party will have sustainable success once it gets in power. If Trump makes America great again, surely now-great Americans would continue to choose the party that carries on his legacy, even against old-school Democrats. And if Harris gets elected, that might be because America has become a woke nation and will continue to be so.

And there are other reasons why a party once in power might stay in power. Democrats are stirring up the fear that if Trump is put back in office, this may be the last election, that Trump will refuse to step down, rule as a dictator, and put an end to American democracy. Trump gave support for that fear when he told a gathering of Christian voters that after voting for him this one time, they “won’t have to vote anymore.” (He later explained that he was talking to infrequent voters, urging them to come out to vote this time, after which they could revert to their usual non-voting habits.)

I don’t believe that a Trump dictatorship is his intent or is possible even if it is. I am more worried that if the Democrats win the presidency, the House, and the Senate, they could implement their agenda of granting statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. By creating two more reliably Democratic states, they would have four more Senators, which could give them a perpetual majority in that body. And they could also pack the Supreme Court by adding enough liberal justices to outvote the current majority of originalists on the court, removing a check and a balance on their power. The result could be a one-party government, like California already has, which could become very difficult for even an old-school Republican party to break through. And they could impose their progressive ideology with no restraints.

Finally, it appears that the Republican Party, even though Trump is its standard-bearer, is already rebranding itself to appeal more to the mainstream. In the course of a thoughtful discussion of Christians’ involvement in politics, Randall Fowler makes this observation:

Among many other things, the 2024 Republican National Convention marked the triumph of Log Cabin Republican attempts to purge the GOP platform of any references to traditional understandings of marriage, sexuality, and the human person. The Republican Party is visibly distancing itself from Christianity and social conservatives. And all pro-life language and policy stances on abortion have been removed from the party platform as well. In isolation, each of these moves may not represent a wholesale abandonment of Christian voters, and not all Christians agree on issues of abortion or marriage, but they collectively convey a party doing its best to rebrand itself in accord with prevailing secular norms.

Click the links for the evidence of what he asserts. Fowler, a professor at Abilene Christian University, says that Christians in politics want to be prophetic, but they keep playing different prophetic roles:

Republican Christians post-Moral Majority have typically wanted to be Moses (laying down the law) or Samuel (anointing the king). Our marginalization in the post-Trump GOP marks the end of that dream, although we are not yet Elijah consigned to the wilderness. Perhaps our model should be Nathan—the conscience of the kingdom, capable of rebuking the king when he falls astray but not estranged to the extent he is barred from the royal court. Doing this will require a renewed vigilance to ensure the spiritual health, theological seriousness, and moral formation of our own churches. May we be faithfully prepared for such a time, for it is coming soon.

In Ehrenreich’s terms, if both Democrats and Republicans revert to a more “normal” perspective, what that might mean is a single dominant ideology. It would be secularist, morally and culturally permissive, pro-abortion, opposed to free market economics, unrestrained in government spending, and championing big government. The parties would both agree on all of that, but would disagree on details. To see what that looks like, see Great Britain, where the Conservative Party has become almost as liberal as the Labour Party.

Christians who care about their vocations as citizens may have to emulate yet another prophet: Daniel in exile.

Illustration: Belshazzar’s Feast by Rembrandt – www.nationalgallery.org.uk : Home : Info, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67423

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Forced Criminality

Last updated on: August 1, 2024 at 7:08 pm By Gene Veith

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We have become so used to scammers–phony solicitations on the phone, sob stories and get rich schemes on emails, sexually-charged come-ons on social media–that we hardly pay attention to them any more. But some people get drawn in to these frauds, sometimes losing everything they have.

But who are these scammers? Criminals to be sure–con artists, fraudsters, and thieves. But in some cases, they are also trafficking victims, slave labor bought, sold, and abused. Law enforcement calls it “forced criminality.”

The Wall Street Journal has published a riveting piece of investigative journalism by Feliz Solomon and Rachel Liang entitled Posing as ‘Alicia,’ This Man Scammed Hundreds Online. He Was Also a Victim with the deck, “A multibillion-dollar cyberfraud industry operating out of Southeast Asia relies on forced labor and torture.”

Scamming takes in tens of billions of dollars from around the world. Hundreds of thousands of people from Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States have been trafficked, sent to Myanmar (a.k.a. Burma) and Cambodia, where they are imprisoned in huge industrial compounds and put to work.

According to Solomon and Liang, these are operated mainly by Chinese gangs that at first were devoted to smuggling drugs, weapons, and people. “A few years ago, they discovered an even easier way to make money: They could simply trick people online into depositing cash directly into their bank accounts.”

They call the scam “pig butchering”– first fattening up the marks by gaining their trust, then butchering them by taking their money.

Scammers typically sit at desks manning laptops and mobile phones loaded with fake user profiles. Six former scammers interviewed by the Journal said the scam dens range widely in sophistication and propensity for abusing staff. But they all described a similar tiered labor system.

A screening team blasts out messages to hundreds of strangers a day, and passes those who reply to a different team, who then build relationships with the targets. Once the target agrees to put money on the table, they’re passed on to another, more technical team that handles transactions. Scammers are expected to “escalate” a certain number of victims each day.

If they don’t, they may be punished. The former scammers described punishments ranging from being beaten with sticks and shocked with cattle prods to being “baked”—forced to perform exercises like frog jumps in the sun in front of the others.

Solomon and Liang interviewed “Billy,” an IT expert from a poor family in Ethiopia who earned a master’s degree from a Chinese University. From there he accepted a job offer with a company only to be spirited to Myanmar, where he was sold several times to various traffickers who forced him to work the scams. “His captors made him assume the fake online alter ego of a rich Singaporean woman they called Alicia. He had to memorize a manual on how to seduce men online and manipulate them into pouring their money into bogus investments.”

The scam played out like this:

Day 1: Learn everything you can about your victim. Ask about their family, their job, where they live. Size up what they’re worth and if they’re vulnerable.

Day 2: Ask about their hobbies, and pretend you like the same things. Suggest to them that they enjoy shared interests together.

Day 3: Chat about past relationships. That night, confess that you’ve had a few drinks and tell the person that you like them.

Day 4: By now, they’re usually ready to start talking business.

The PDF contained detailed scripts telling the scammers exactly what words to use. It was like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, offering up options if the conversation took certain turns, or ran into obstacles like a suspicious wife or financial controls at the bank.

The scammers are trained and tested, Billy and Alfan said. Then they’re given about six mobile phones with WhatsApp and Telegram, and a laptop loaded with photos and videos of their alias, Alicia, as well as random pictures of things like food and pets and cars.

In the beginning, when they’re learning, the screening team will send them three to five potential victims per day. If they’re good at the job, they’ll get more. Their company mainly targeted men from the Middle East and South Asia.

Billy said he handled 15 to 20 cases every day for 16 months—hundreds of victims. He still has vivid memories of the men he was forced to deceive. Some were wealthy, with high-profile careers and families. Others were poor, losing what little they had.

Wracked with guilt, Billy organized a strike. For that he was handcuffed and hung by his wrists for a week. Then he was tortured and beaten. Finally, his family sold their house so they could ransom him for $7,000, whereupon he was released. With the help of an anti-trafficking organization, he is back in Ethiopia, but he is ashamed to go back to his family, since he cost them their home, and he is still tormented for what he has done.

Photo: Thousands Trapped in Myanmar’s Cyber Slavery Racket via YouTube

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The Conspiracy to Hide Biden

Last updated on: July 22, 2024 at 3:11 pm By Gene Veith

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Have we had a functional president over the last few years? Do we have one now? Or has the Executive Branch been led by an unelected committee that has conspired to keep the ailing Joe Biden hidden–not only from the public but from the rest of the government–while they ran the show?

These are the disturbing questions that are emerging after President Biden’s re-election bid came to an end. The Wall Street Journal has run an investigative piece entitled How the Bet on an 81-Year-Old Joe Biden Turned Into an Epic Miscalculation.

The five reporters who worked on the story (which is behind a paywall) interviewed some 50 administration officials, staffers, lawmakers, and other insiders. Even though the general public has long been concerned with President Biden’s age and Republicans have been hammering him over his “senior moments,” most of those interviewed were genuinely surprised to see Biden come unravelled during the debate. This is because Biden had been essentially hidden away from his own government.

The report begins with an account of President Biden presenting his case for the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill to the House Democratic Caucus. He spoke disjointedly for half an hour, never getting around to asking the lawmakers to vote for the bill. So after he was finished, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, obviously frustrated, took the microphone and told the Congressmen she would explain what the president was trying to say. That was the last time the president spoke to the Democratic Caucus. That was in 2021, three years ago!

We also learn that Biden hardly ever met with his Cabinet members, much less held meetings of the entire Cabinet. Senior members of the White House staff took care of all of that, we are told, with one official admitting that the president was not engaged in the “hands-on business of governing.”

All the while, those Senior members of the White House staff came down hard on any Democrat who expressed any questions or raised any doubts about Biden’s condition. They insisted on how sharp Biden was. To say otherwise, they said, was to play in the hands of the Republicans.

Some Democrats did want a genuine primary contest, with alternative candidates competing with Biden for the presidential bid. But top party operatives crushed that attempt and manipulated the process–by making South Carolina the first primary, state parties only allowing Biden on the ballot, and threatening to blackball anyone who worked for another candidate– so that running against him was impossible.

When Special Council Robert Hur, investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents after he left office as Vice President, refused to press charges because he was “elderly man with a poor memory,” with “diminished faculties in advancing age,” he was excoriated by White House operatives. But, according to the story, “Outside of Biden’s core staff and family, he was the only person to the public’s knowledge who had spent such an extended period interviewing the president, spending five hours over two days in October asking Biden detailed questions.” No one else had been allowed to spend as much time with him!

Even after the debate debacle, as Biden’s decline was impossible to deny and as more and more accounts of his problems were coming out (such as introducing Ukrainian president Zelensky as “President Putin” and referring to “Vice President Trump”), his handlers continued to insist upon his great abilities. They did so right up to time of the announcement of his withdrawal. Even that, I would add, kept Biden out of sight, breaking the news in a social media post rather than a televised announcement (as LBJ did) or a press conference.

The story describes a pattern of rationalization and denial:

[Some] say they realize now that they had simply been looking the other way. One longtime donor recalled that on the last three occasions he saw the president, Biden had repeatedly lost his train of thought and interrupted his sentence with “whatever.” The donor didn’t think much of it at the time. “I was probably rationalizing,” he said. “Subconsciously, you’re like—OK, I don’t think I can deal with this reality. What choice do I have? Nobody else is running.”

A Democratic member of the House of Representatives now says this:

“I am really concerned about what we were not told during these months,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D., Texas) in an interview. “I remain concerned about that—that for whatever reasons, this overprotective, stage-managed kind of operation not only appears to have denied the American people broadly of an understanding of the president’s current situation, but also other elected officials.”

A “stage-managed kind of operation”! I can understand a loyal staff being “overprotective.” But we live in a democracy, as the Democrats keep telling us, something they say Trump is threatening and that they are vowing to save. I’d like to learn what decisions Biden’s unelected handlers made for him. And the nature of the lies they told to hide what they were doing.

But what could have been done? This is what the 25th Amendment of the Constitution was crafted to deal with, the eventuality that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” But short of that, those in charge should have at least discouraged President Biden from running for re-election–as they have finally done just weeks before the convention– instead of quashing the very idea.

The Wall Street Journal article describes what happened as “an epic, yearslong miscalculation,” “a story of allies eager to look the other way, Biden advisers who worked to stamp out doubts about his vigor and a party apparatus that boxed out alternative candidates.”

Charles C. W. Cooke calls it something else: “This was a conspiracy, perpetrated by the White House against the public, some parts of the press, the broader Democratic Party, and Congress.”

Photo: President Biden Makes Infrastructure Announcement by Marc A. Hermann / MTA via Flickr, CC by 2.0

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A Catholic Shift from Transubstantiation to Real Presence?

Last updated on: July 26, 2024 at 6:40 am By Gene Veith

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While the Republicans were in Milwaukee, some 50,000 Catholics were in Indianapolis for the National Eucharistic Congress, the culmination of pilgrimages and processions across America following a consecrated Host. The goal is a “eucharistic revival,” described as “the joyful, expectant, grassroots response of the Church in the United States to the divine invitation to be united once again around the source and summit of our faith in the celebration of the Eucharist.”

The catalyst for this was two disturbing polls. In 2019, Pew Research asked Catholics what they believe about the bread and wine in Holy Communion, whether they believe that “during Catholic Mass, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus.” Or whether they believe that the bread and wine used in Communion “are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”

The first alternative is “transubstantiation,” which is the teaching of the Roman Catholic church, the view that the bread and the wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ. Their very “substance” is changed, though the “accidents,” the external appearance of the bread and wine remain. Quite literally, they “become” the body and blood of Jesus. But though this is the official and required dogma of the church, only 31% of Catholics said they believe that!

Conversely, 69% of Catholics–over two thirds–said they believe in the radical Protestant Zwingli’s position that the bread and wine are just symbols.

Not only that, a later survey by Catholic researchers in 2022 found that the percentage that believes in transubstantiation was little changed (35%), but it went on to ask the respondents what they thought the church’s teaching on the subject is. A majority of Catholics (51%) believe that the church teaches that “Jesus is only symbolically present in the consecrated bread and wine.”

The bishops were shocked at this data. They launched a three-year program requiring special teaching about the Eucharist in every diocese, getting laity involved in vigils of adoration of the Sacrament, Corpus Christi processions, and other devotional exercises, all culminating in the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis.

Recently, another survey went out, finding that the laity’s lack of sacramental knowledge might not be so bad after all. Vinea Research, a Catholic outfit, criticized the previous studies for using the word “become.” That is not the language the catechism uses, the organization claimed, or that Catholics are familiar with. So the new alternatives were these:

a. Jesus Christ is truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist

b. Bread and wine are symbols of Jesus, but Jesus is not truly present.

This time, when Catholics were asked about the “real presence” rather than transubstantiation, the findings seemed more encouraging. A full 69% said they believe in the real presence–the same percentage that said in the other poll that the elements were just symbols! Vinea concluded,

“[U]sing language more commonly understood by Catholics, Vinea’s research indicates that many more Catholics than originally thought have an authentic understanding of the core Catholic teaching of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist,” the group said in a press release.

These findings are being hailed as evidence that, in the words of the title of an article on the subject, New study suggests more than two-thirds of Catholics believe the Eucharist is truly Jesus. No, this new study suggests that more than two-thirds of Catholics still don’t believe in transubstantiation. They believe that Jesus is present in the Eucharist, not that He is the Eucharist.

The “real presence” is not really a full “authentic understanding of the core Catholic teaching.” That’s more of a Protestant term, though it’s understood in different ways, used in Lutheranism but also in some Reformed traditions, such as Anglicanism, which speak of a real “spiritual” presence.

Conservative Catholics recognize that the Catholic teaching has to go beyond “presence” language. Peter M.J. Stravinskas makes that point and observes, accurately, that even Martin Luther had a stronger belief than the one suggested in the survey.

To be sure, we Lutherans sometimes speak of the “real presence,” but that’s insufficient to fully describe what we believe about the “sacramental union.” We have to always be able to say, along with Christ, “This is my body.” This is my blood.”

I read one Catholic theologian explaining that transubstantiation, which has to do with Christ’s body and blood, is what makes possible the real presence of the entire Christ, body and soul. OK. The terms can be used together. Similarly, the Lutheran’s sacramental union makes possible the real presence of Christ.

But much of the Catholic discussion of the eucharist on line, even among priests and theologians, is just “real presence.” Does this mean Catholics are drifting away from the doctrine of transubstantiation? Are they recognizing that this teaching is untenable, a quasi-Gnostic or docetic rejection of matter as an illusion? Cath0lic thinkers say much about the sacramental nature of the material world, but transubstantiation denies that: If the bread and wine no longer exist, but are just an illusory appearance, the capacity of the material realm to convey Christ is rejected, not affirmed.

Are Catholics coming around to the Lutheran position? Not really. Maybe they are coming closer to a “sacramental union” understanding of real presence. But for Lutherans, Christ’s presence is not the whole issue. The Small Catechism says of the Sacrament of the Altar, that “It is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine, instituted by Christ Himself for us Christians to eat and to drink.” “It is.” The Catechism goes on to say in answer to the question, “How can bodily eating and drinking do such great things?”,

Certainly not just eating and drinking do these things, but the words written here: “Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.” These words, along with the bodily eating and drinking, are the main thing in the Sacrament. Whoever believes these words has exactly what they say: “forgiveness of sins.”

For Lutherans, the Sacrament is not a sacrifice we offer up to God, or a meritorious work, or a devotional offering, or something sinners need to stay away from, as in the Catholic system. Rather, it is the tangible Gospel, Christ’s body given “for you”; Christ’s blood poured out “for the remission of all your sins.” In Holy Communion, we thus receive Christ in faith. For Lutherans, the Sacrament is inextricably connected to justification by faith. I’m not seeing Catholics going that far.

Photo: Blessed Sacrament Procession, Cropped and straightened by JD; original photograph by Fennec., CC BY-SA 2.0 DE <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons

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