The Catechesis Problem

Last updated on: November 17, 2021 at 3:15 pm By Gene Veith

American evangelicalism today is plagued with scandals, politics, moral failures, and a confused message. This is largely due to a failure of catechesis.

So argues James Ernest, editor-in-chief of W. B. Eerdmans, a leading Christian publishing company. In his post Evangelicalism in the USA: Discipleship Failure Owing to Catechesis Failure, he writes, referring to the forgotten part of the Great Commission (Matthew 16:19-20), “Over the last five decades or so the evangelical church in the US failed to form its adherents into disciples.”

The discipleship failure is owing to catechesis failure. “Catechesis” is the latinized spelling of a Greek word that refers to teaching. . . .The mission of the church (read the end of the Gospel of Matthew again) is to “make disciples, teaching them to observe everything that I have commanded you.” That teaching is catechesis. . . .New Christians have to be taught to observe, which means not just to be aware of what Christ did for them according to some particular doctrinal slogan, but to become observant in the sense of putting Christ first, ahead of every other loyalty. Key elements in catechesis would include knowing scripture and doctrine and practicing the sacraments and prayer—all in a way that purges away all contradictory and competing gods and spirits and loyalties and enables an integrated life of faith. . . .

Christians do not automatically become faithful disciples. It is a difficult process, powered by the Holy Spirit and deliberately fostered, cultivated, by teachers and pastors, older sisters and brothers in the faith, according to inherited patterns. This is the meaning of catechesis. No catechesis, or inadequate catechesis, means that people are not formed into disciples, or that their formation is defective.

Dr. Ernest goes on to cite three areas in which most evangelicals show defective catechesis:

(1) The Bible. Most evangelicals today hardly ever read the Bible and know little about how to study or apply it.

(2) Doctrine. Most evangelicals also know little about doctrine, what Christians have always believed and what their own church traditions have always believed. For example, all of the theological strains of Christianity–Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Pietists–have much to say about how Christians should deal with politics and other challenges of living in the world, and yet modern-day Christians seem oblivious to them.

(3) Prayer. American Christians today pray very little, and when they do, it is often very different from Biblical prayer, which includes soul-searching and repentance. Dr. Ernest points out that Christians today often spend much of their energy maintaining how innocent they are, rather than acknowledging their sinfulness and need for Christ’s forgiveness.

I think Dr. Ernest is right, and I urge you read his article. I would add, though, that, in order to have effective catechesis, it helps to actually have a catechism.

I am not saying that in order to crow about how we Lutherans have a really good one, the Small Catechism, which may be Luther’s greatest piece of writing. Calvinists have their Westminster Catechism and Heidelberg Catechism, as do, of course, the Catholics and other Protestant traditions have catechisms somewhere in their history. But most evangelicals today have no catechisms at all.

Dr. Ernest is speaking about catechesis more broadly, and he is right to do so. Even those churches with catechisms fall short in the areas that he describes. But I would argue that part of the problem he documents comes from most evangelical churches having no particular well-defined theology that they can teach.

A big proportion of evangelical churches are “non-denominational,” and even many of those that are affiliated with a larger church body emulate non-denominational churches in playing down doctrinal distinctives and allowing their members to believe, with some exceptions, pretty much whatever they want. This is related to another trait, the extreme individualism of evangelical piety. Again, individuals–being filled with the Holy Spirit, with the right to interpret the Bible themselves, and with the assumption that Christianity is just a matter of a relationship between them and Jesus–will have the tendency to believe, within limits, whatever and to live however they want.

Now, to their credit, evangelicals do believe in the Bible and do believe in Jesus and His importance in salvation. These are huge and definitive convictions of faith. And they do serve as a bulwark against the worst manifestations of unbelief.

But theology is helpful, especially in times of trial, in times when your faith is being challenged, when new issues come up and it isn’t clear how to deal with them. That is, in times like today. While it is true that theology has been reduced to an academic discipline, church theology at its best gives guidance, shaped by historical experience and by many Christians’ deep study of the Scripture, on the depths of Christian spirituality and how to live out this faith in the world.

It is possible for Baptists to believe in the believer’s “sole sufficiency” to interpret Scripture and for Pentecostals to believe in the illumination of the Holy Spirit without abandoning theology. In fact, there are Baptist and Pentecostal catechisms. Those could be dusted off.

Or, if that is too much to ask, here is a broader understanding of catechism. Technically, I am told, the term “catechism” referred to the texts that were the foundation of Christian education: the Ten Commandments, the Apostle’s Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer, plus other texts considered essential by the particular theological tradition (for Lutherans, these included the Biblical passages on Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, Confession, and Vocation). The question and answer format is a means of teaching the catechism, an application of the teaching technique in classical education known as dialectic.

So, if you are nondenominational, start with an in depth study of the Ten Commandments, which will give you and those you are teaching the framework for Biblical ethics. If you can’t use the creed, which sets out the facts that are the basis of the Christian faith, cobble out an equivalent from the Bible, using, for example, the first chapters of John’s Gospel and the first chapters of Romans. Then delve into the riches of the Lord’s Prayer, which teaches our relationship with God and the practice of prayer.

Then, if you want, go into the proof texts for your church’s distinctives, whether about salvation or the Holy Spirit or good works, or whatever they may be. (Notice that your church has at least an implicit theology after all.)

And lest you think such catechesis is only “head knowledge,” consider how the Word of God creates faith in the heart, which, in turn, bears the fruit of love for our neighbors. And also provokes prayer.

See, for example, Praying the Small Catechism by John Pless on how the Small Catechism is to be used not only as a compendium of doctrines but also as an instrument for prayer, spiritual growth, and the Christian life. (To order direct from CPH, go here.)

And lest we think catechisms are just for instructing children and new Christians, consider what Luther says in the Preface to the Large Catechism, another more extensive catechism that we have:

I am also a doctor and preacher, yea, as learned and experienced as all those may be who have such presumption and security; yet I do as a child who is being taught the Catechism, and ever morning, and whenever I have time, I read and say, word for word, the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Psalms, etc. And I must still read and study daily, and yet I cannot master it as I wish, but must remain a child and pupil of the Catechism, and am glad so to remain.

HT: fellow Patheos blogger Chris Gehrz. Read his post on the subject.

Illustration: “The Catechism Lesson” by Jules-Alexis Muenier (1890), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Overcoming Polarization

Last updated on: November 14, 2021 at 6:50 pm By Gene Veith

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If Americans are polarized culturally and politically, and if even the various parties and factions are plagued by internal polarization, what is the way forward? Can we–or should we–overcome our polarization?

First of all, polarization is not necessarily a bad thing. Moral and spiritual conflicts are part of the human condition, and they allow for no compromise or unification. “For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?” (2 Corinthians 6:14). To be sure, not all political or cultural conflicts are of this nature, and treating them as if they were is a symptom of what happens when worldly ideologies take the place of religion. And yet some of our conflicts–such as the battles over abortion–are indeed moral and spiritual struggles.

But even in secular terms, polarization and conflict are inevitable. Our Constitution is designed specifically for a society that consists of contending interests, competing ideas, and antagonistic factions. The genius of our Constitutional order is that it depends on such conflicts, including the built-in conflicts between the different branches of government, to check and balance each other. In such a dynamic though contentious society, individual liberty can flourish in a way that it simply cannot in a society that insists on unity and thus conformity. The further genius of our Constitutional order is that provides a way for a diverse nation to move forward despite and even because of these differences, as those checks and balances force the factions to work together without squelching them.

And this is our problem today. We are so polarized–nationally and politically, but socially, economically, and often within our families–that we are coming close to the “war of all against all” theorized by Thomas Hobbes as the “state of nature” before the rise of social contracts. Theologically, God has designed the “Estates” of the family, the church, and the state, forcing sinful human beings to live and work together in spite of themselves, where they can discover vocation and the love of neighbor. Right now, the Estates are jeopardized by both toxic individualism and toxic tribalism.

So how can polarization, whether it is dysfunctional or necessary, be overcome? One way to achieve unity, for better or worse, is to have a common enemy. The four factions of the Democratic Party that we blogged about yesterday all came together against Donald Trump. Without him, they have reverted to fighting each other again.

The last moment of national unity that we enjoyed was in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Pearl Harbor also united America against a common foe. Wars have that effect, but they must not be wars of choice–as in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan–which are polarizing. Unifying wars are defensive, in which citizens set aside their differences to defend each other against a genuine threat to the nation.

Such wars, of course, are worse than the polarization, and some wars have historically been ginned up by corrupt governments to unify and distract their citizens. We need to beware of other manifestations of the “common enemy” syndrome. Within nations, groups can be turned into scapegoats, blamed as the source of the country’s problems and demonized so as to unite the rest of the nation. Jews have been a convenient scapegoat, not only in Hitler’s Germany but in other countries throughout history. This is often the mindset behind other kinds of religious persecution, including that of Christians, for example in ancient Rome. (I don’t think American Christians need to worry about this right now, though it could happen someday.)

Another way to overcome polarization is the formation of new coalitions and new alignments. Already, some of the polar opposites are showing similarities to each other. For example, both progressives and Trumpist conservatives are complaining about the power and influence of big corporations. During the debacle of President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, he took criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, but both progressives and Trumpist conservatives praised him for ending the war in Afghanistan. Those who factions can’t stand each other, and yet they have common interests and beliefs, which might someday come to the fore.

A curious phenomenon is the political realignment of America’s social classes. Used to, Democrats were the party of the working class. To this day, this is a hallmark of the party’s identity. Among the “Stalwart Democrats” faction we blogged about yesterday are many aging union members, denizens of ethnic neighborhoods, and Black Americans who have always voted for Democrats no matter what. And yet, Donald Trump’s strongest constituency is to be found in the working class, particularly the white working class, though he has been making inroads with Blacks and Hispanics, due to their common class interests and beliefs.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has become dominated by white, affluent, college-educated middle class, as well as the “woke capitalists” of the big corporations. Big business and the bourgeoisie used to be the constituency of the Republicans! There is still some of that, just as there are still some working class folks among the Democrats, but this amounts to a seismic inversion of the political parties. And, as we saw yesterday, the most radical faction, the “Progressive Left,” for all of their indignation against racism and “white supremacy” and their determination to overthrow the established order, is the whitest demographic of all!

These radicals are realizing that they cannot have much of a revolution without the proletariat. See for example the hard-left periodical Jacobin Magazine, which recently published an article that purports to show “Why Progressives Need the Working Class.”

Similarly, woke and wealthy Democrats are getting worried about the confiscatory wealth taxes being proposed by their party, as well as by threats of stifling regulations on their businesses and the financial sector. At some point, their economic interests might at some point trump the social status they enjoy from their progressive poses.

In the meantime, on the other side, Republicans are realizing the appeal of a conservatism oriented not to big business but to the working class. Leading up to the New Deal, populism favored liberal Democrats. But now, populism is what propelled Donald Trump. In his analysis of the recent election in Virginia and elsewhere, entitled The Woke Meet Their Match: Parents, Andrew Sullivan concludes, “Trumpism without Trump has a potent future.”

Other coalitions are possible. Libertarians could ally with free market business types. They could contend with a culturally conservative multi-racial working class party. The radical leftists could be squeezed out, lacking a broad constituency, and be exiled back to the fringes.

The point is, alliances and factions shift, ideologies change, and events impact human affairs. That’s the nature of the temporal, worldly realm, which is why they don’t work as religions.

Image by wittdigital via Pixabay

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Should Couples and Their Pastor Reject Marriage Licenses?

Last updated on: November 8, 2021 at 2:32 pm By Gene Veith

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“By the power invested in me by the state of Wisconsin, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

That formula, said by the pastor in many traditional wedding services, indicates that the officiating minister is acting as an agent of the state by signing the marriage license and establishing a legal, state-recognized marriage, which entitles the couple to all of the legal benefits and responsibilities of starting a new family.

Today, in light of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage, some pastors are saying that, in light of the government’s decision to adopt an understanding of marriage that violates that of Scripture, they can no longer in good conscience serve as “agents of the state” in this matter.

They express willingness to give couples a church marriage, but they are refusing to sign marriage licenses. Similarly, some Christian couples want to forego marriage licenses, along with the legal status granted by the government, and be content to just be “married in the eyes of God.”

What are we to make of this? And how should pastors navigate the various issues regarding weddings and marriage in the current “post-Obergefell” climate?

The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has the Commission on Theology and Church Relations (CTCR), a a group of scholars, pastors, and laypeople that the church calls upon to study issues like these. The commission holds to the Lutheran Confessions, but it is known for its fidelity to Scripture and for its careful applications of Biblical teachings, making its reports helpful to non-Lutheran Christians as well.

The CTCR has just published a report entitled ‘Marriage Between Church and State: A Report on Clergy Serving as “Agents of the State,” ’ available as a free download.

I urge you to read the report yourself, since I can hardly do justice to it here.

It begins with a thorough study of Biblical teaching on marriage. God has not only instituted marriage, He is the one who joins men and women together into marriage and makes them “one flesh” (Matthew 19:1-6). The Bible also grounds marriage in the relationship between Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5: 22-33).

And yet, marriage is the foundation of the “earthly estate,” a temporal institution for human beings of every culture and religion. Referring to an earlier CTCR report on Human Sexuality, the report observes,

Therefore, although marriage is established by God, the 1981 report declares that marriage is not “primarily an ecclesiastical matter.” Indeed, in the first centuries of the church, marriage was viewed as a secular act. This does not negate the reality of marriage as a divine institution. Rather, it is a reminder that “as a divinely ordained earthly estate [marriage] can be legitimately contracted in the civil realm.” However, the secular or civil aspect of marriage rightly does not in any way discourage the long-standing Christian practice of solemnizing the vows of marriage in the context of public worship with the Word of God and prayer. Such “consecration signifies that marriage is holy because it is God-ordained and that it can be received with thanksgiving (1 Tim. 4:5).”7

As a divine institution that God enacts by means of human authority, marriage stands firmly between the human and the divine, or, as we may put it today, between church and state.

Lutherans teach that marriage is not a sacrament. Therefore, pastors do not make a marriage, as such. Nor does the state. Rather, what ratifies a marriage “is mutual consent, the ‘commitment of a man and woman to a permanent sharing of their lives.'” Thus, common law marriages–or, I would add, the ceremony-free, license-free marriages practiced by some cultures–are legitimate and binding marriages (which the CTCR document discusses but does not recommend).

The point is, God makes marriages, but he does so “by means of human authority,” which He works through to govern His temporal kingdom. This is an aspect of the doctrine of vocation, which teaches how God works through human beings. This authority doesn’t have to be the same as what we have today, with its licensing and marriage laws. In some societies, the parents of the couple–also a God-ordained human authority–ratify the marriage. But Christians are always under the authority of the legal system in which they live. For us 21st century Americans, that would include state marriage laws with their license requirements.

The report shows that the Biblical teachings about marriage can be and have been operative in a very wide range of cultural and legal systems. But what about legal systems that violate the Biblical teachings against marriage? The report examines cases of this happening, such as when, in the early days of the Communist revolution, the Soviets outlawed marriage altogether, though this was soon rescinded.

In the Bible itself, we see the tension between the Mosaic law, which permitted divorce, and Jesus’s teachings against it (Matthew 19:1-12). The report said that the Mosaic law, among other things, was a national legal code, which, though in conflict with God’s will, was permitted, according to Jesus, because of human sin: “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). (So could that distinction allow for same-sex marriage, as a way to order fallen sexual activity, even though it is against God’s created design for marriage? The report says, no, since Jesus’s teaching does not open the door for all accommodations. Jesus makes clear that divorce is never a good thing, even though social laws allow it.)

But what about “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29)? The report formulates three questions to answer in determining whether the marriage laws of the society contradicts the Christian view of marriage to the point that the Christian must violate those laws:

1. Does the state’s definition invalidate biblical marriage or make it illegal or subject to penalty?

2. Does the state prescribe or impose invalid marriages upon individual Christians?

3. Does the state prescribe unbiblical definitions of marriage for the church,42 impose any unbiblical practices upon the church, or in any way seek to prevent the church’s obedience to God in the church’s marriage practices?

As of yet, in regard to the extension of the marriage laws to same-sex couples, the answer to all three questions is “no.” Christians may still practice Christian marriage under state law. Therefore, we are still subject to that law and should obey it.

The report concludes,

We believe that it is unwarranted for Christian couples to refuse to secure legal marriage on the grounds that the definition of marriage has changed in the U.S. and elsewhere. While the definition has changed, it is not redefined in such a way that it excludes a positive Christian understanding of marriage. We cannot endorse any convincing moral argument for a couple to refuse licensure.

It follows that pastors should not officiate at weddings for couples who refuse to get a marriage license. This includes, according to the report, weddings for couples who want their marriage to be “off the books” for financial reasons, as in older couples who would lose pension benefits if they marry again. However sympathetic one might be, this practice adds to the violation of marriage laws the additional sin of deceit.

The report concludes,

Marriage truly does stand between church and state. It is both sacred and secular. It is God’s institution and holy work, but one that He enacts by means of earthly authorities and instruments such as laws and customs. Marriage, by God’s own created design, is subject to earthly laws and customs, even though human laws and customs sometimes undermine or even abrogate God’s good purposes for marriage.

Again, read the entire study.

What do you think of this take on the subject? Are there issues or arguments that it fails to address? Or is this a good example of Biblical thinking applied to a contentious current issue?

Photo by Marko Milivojevic on Pixnio

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The Sterilization Boom

Last updated on: October 31, 2021 at 8:31 pm By Gene Veith

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The marriage rate is lower than ever (56% of Millennials, aged 25-40, are unmarried). People are having less sex (the number of sex-free young men 18-30 has tripled since 2008), and they are having fewer children (25% of adults in Michigan are childless by choice, deaths outnumber births in half the states, and in San Francisco, there are more dogs than children). And a growing number of young women are making sure that they will never have children by getting sterilized.

So reports journalist Suzy Weiss in her article ‘Humans are a mistake’: Why more young women are getting sterilized.

Part of this is “antinatalism,” the view that it is immoral to have children, a topic we have blogged about. As Weiss puts it, “The message from this young cohort is clear: Life is already exhausting enough. And the world is broken and burning. Who would want to bring new, innocent life into a criminally unequal society situated on a planet with catastrophically rising sea levels?”

She quotes psychologist Clay Routledge, who says that many young people have sense that “humans were a mistake.”“They’re saying that the future isn’t a good investment,” he says, “And if there’s no future, why would you be anything but hedonistic? Why would you donate to charities? Why would you try to make the world better or care about human progress?”

One 28-year-0ld woman Weiss profiles reflects this view, saying, “I think it’s morally wrong to bring a child into the world. . . .No matter how good someone has it, they will suffer.”

But the other women getting sterilizations whom she profiles do not seem particularly concerned about the fate of “new, innocent life.” They tend to speak pretty callously about children. In fact, the same 28-year-old, a Texan, who says it’s wrong to have children because they will suffer says she is rushing to get sterilized because she fears that her state’s Heartbeat Bill will prevent her from getting an abortion. “I can’t take the risk of getting pregnant and not being able to abort.”

Other reasons for getting sterilized are bad experiences with their own parents. “My generation is very aware of the ways that our parents traumatized us,” a young woman told the reporter. “My mom smoked a lot of weed and did her own thing, and my dad was away a lot for work.”

Others express a fear of pregnancy and giving birth, a psychological condition known as tokophobia.

Others have an aversion to children. One young woman commented that kids “kind of gross her out.”

A big reason, though, seems to be the desire to not be tied down, to be free. To the question whether she might come to regret her decision to get sterilized, one woman responded, “What’s there to regret? That I’ll be too happy? Too free?”

Another interview was especially telling. The reporter asked a 19-year-old about her plans for the future after she gets sterilized. The young woman was annoyed. “It’s kind of hard to ask someone who is nineteen and hasn’t finished college what they want their life to look like.”

Exactly! She herself doesn’t know how her life will unfold. Our lives change. And she herself will change. Which is why it is so unwise for women so young to take such a drastic and permanent step. When she gets older, she may well yearn to have a child.

The accounts in the story give a picture of young women happy with their lives now and wanting to perpetuate their current way of living. But that won’t last very long, whether they have children or not, as their friends who do have children move out of their orbit and as they outgrow their social scene. They fail to factor in growing older. And that children grow older.

When they think of having children, they think of babies. But babies, however “gross” they might seem, grow up into toddlers, school children, adolescents, and young adults much like they are now. In fact, for parents, some of the biggest satisfactions of parenthood come when one’s children reach adulthood.

Meanwhile, the parents themselves have grown older. Their adult children–and, importantly, their children–become an important and treasured part of their lives. This extended family becomes their prime social outlet. And gives them the security that they will not die alone.

Not everyone needs to be a parent, just as not everyone needs to get married. Some people don’t have those vocations, and that is fine.

I’m just sad for these young women, not so much for rejecting motherhood but for the reasons that they give, their narcissism and their nihilism.

According to the article, 39% of Generation Z (aged 9 to 24) is hesitant to have children “for fear of the climate apocalypse.” This phenomenon does have an apocalyptic dimension, but it’s not that global warming will destroy the human race. (Those who really believe that “human are a mistake” should welcome that prospect, not try to prevent it by environmental activism.) Rather, this mindset is a sign of the genuine apocalypse:

And there followed [Jesus, being led to His crucifixion,] a great multitude of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting for him. But turning to them Jesus said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’” (Luke 23:27-29)

Illustration: Jesus Meets the Daughters of Jerusalem (8th Station of the Cross), photo by Damian Gadal via Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0. No changes.

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The Four Distinctives of the Reformation

Last updated on: October 29, 2021 at 7:59 am By Gene Veith

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Sunday is Reformation Day, the 504th anniversary of Luther’s posting of his 95 Theses against the sale of indulgences.

In a series of posts on the meaning of “evangelical,” Gordon-Conwell theology professor James Emery White sees the beginnings of that movement in the Reformation. He points out that the Reformers shared beliefs about God, Christ, sin, humanity, eternal life, and other basic tenets of Christianity with the Catholic tradition. Drawing on the work of another evangelical scholar, he identifies four differences from that tradition.

From James Emery White, Understanding “Evangelical” Part One: The Reformation and 18th Century Revivals, at Crosswalk.com:

Richard Mouw, former president of Fuller Seminary, once detailed four major distinctions between the Reformers and their Catholic heritage that Evangelicals continue to share. The first distinction concerned the issue of salvation (soteriology). The Catholic tradition asserted that justification comes through a combination of faith and good works. The Reformers countered that justification is through faith in Christ alone.

The second point of tension was the issue of religious authority. The Roman Church insisted that religious authority is a sacred institution established by Jesus Christ on Peter and his successors (the bishops of Rome). Reformation doctrine held that all truth necessary for faith and behavior is found in one source—the Bible, the written word of God.

A third area of disagreement was the doctrine of the Church (ecclesiology). Catholic theology at the time of the Reformation held that the true Church is that sacred hierarchical and priestly institution that Jesus Christ founded on Peter, the first pope, and on the apostles, the first bishops. The theology of the Reformers did not understand the true Church as a sacred hierarchy but as a community of faith in which all true believers share the priestly task.

The final major area of division was over the subject of Christian living. The monastic way of life was thoroughly entrenched in Catholic practice and thought. The Reformers understood the essence of Christian living as serving God in one’s calling, whether it be in secular or ecclesiastical life.

Though evangelicals generally uphold these points, says Prof. White, the genealogy of evangelicalism is through the line of Pietism, with its emphasis on personal piety, and the consequent Wesleyan revivals and the American camp meetings of the Great Awakening, all of which led to the definitive evangelical distinctive: “an immediate and instantaneous conversion to Christ.”

Prof. White follows the conventional view that in the 17th century the Reformation degenerated into an “unyielding spirit of Protestant orthodoxy,” which he characterizes as “relatively lifeless.” Thus, the Pietists were bringing life into “dead orthodoxy.”

I’m pretty sure that view is questioned by contemporary scholarship, as indicated in the Wikipedia article on Lutheran orthodoxy. See, for example, this.

On the face of it, I don’t see how the hymns of writers like Paul Gerhard, Philipp Nicolai, Johann von Rist; the devotional writings of Johann Gerhard, who was also the major theologian of the era; and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach could be seen as anything less than pious, much less indicative of a “dead” faith.

Concordia Publishing House has published a collection entitled Lives and Writings of the Great Fathers of the Lutheran Church, which will also disabuse you of that notion.

What these artists and theologians of the age of Lutheran orthodoxy did was to explore, defend, and apply those four distinctives of the Reformation.

At any rate, those four distinctives of the Reformation seem pretty valid. It doesn’t give us a full picture of what the Reformation was about. Perhaps the solas are better, with Grace Alone, conveying the monergistic nature of salvation–that God does everything for our salvation–an important facet of the Gospel for both Lutherans and Calvinists. Then again, the solas say nothing about vocation, a teaching described in two of the four of Mouw’s distinctives. But those four certainly don’t account for the Lutheran reformation, with its understanding of how the sacraments tie all of this together. But the four can be descriptive of the broad lines of Reformation thinking, as held by most early Protestants.

And yet today, there are many Protestants, yea, quite a few evangelicals, who believe that salvation is “through a combination of faith and good works,” instead of “through faith in Christ alone.” Mainline liberal Protestants don’t consider the Bible to be much of an authority, ascribing to themselves–as institutional churches–the authority to change Christian doctrines and moral teachings. The last two, the priesthood of all believers and the notion that Christianity is to be lived out in the ordinary world rather than in monastic separatism, have to do with the doctrine of vocation. That teaching has long been neglected, but I have been trying to bring it back, as in my trilogy on vocation.

It would seem that the message of the Reformation–indeed, of Lutheran orthodoxy, to explore, defend, and apply that message–is still needed.

Illustration: Luther and the 95 Theses, By Julius Hübner – https://www.flickr.com/photos/magdeburg/8346882305/in/photostream/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48375610

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The Great Resignation

Last updated on: October 25, 2021 at 9:45 am By Gene Veith

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While most people’s preoccupation with the economy is usually about creating jobs, our economy now has to deal with people who had jobs but quit.

In August, a record 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs, adding up to 20 million since April. That amounts to nearly 3% of the American workforce. These numbers, which do not include retirements, is 60% higher than last year.*

What is happening?

To be sure, most of these folks are probably quitting their old job in an effort to get a better one, taking advantage of the booming job market and higher wages due to the massive labor shortage. But with over 10 million jobs going begging, the so-called “Great Resignation” cannot fully be accounted for by people just changing jobs. Many economists are saying that the “Great Resignation” is a major cause of the labor shortage. Many of the new unemployed-by-choice are not looking for new jobs at all.

COVID is one reason. The lockdowns meant layoffs of innumerable workers in food service and other low wage positions. Now that things are opening up, many of those workers are not coming back. Again, many can now find better-paying jobs in other businesses desperate to hire people. But some have learned to survive without working, so they are not rushing to come back. On the other end of the job spectrum, many office workers who were forced to work from home enjoyed that. Now that they are called back to the office, they are choosing not to go.

Another factor is the COVID vaccine mandates. An untold number of working class folks, of all races, just do not believe in getting vaccines, and they would rather quit their jobs than submit to employer or government-imposed mandates. When President Biden’s requirement that businesses with over 100 employees must get them vaccinated or fire them, the numbers are going to shoot up, though this will mean involuntary, not voluntary, terminations. Still, already many workers are quitting over this. And they are coming from critically important fields: the police (contributing to soaring crime rates), health care (including nurses who care for COVID patients), air travel (as in the Southwest cancellations), and truck drivers (contributing to the supply chain disruptions).

Other workers are reportedly just burnt out. Like Johnny Paycheck in his iconic song, “Take This Job and Shove It!” (To give you the full sentiment, I embed the video below.)

How are these former workers getting by? Those who are old enough are taking early retirement (though they are not factored into the statistics). Others are living off their retirement savings. Younger workers are doubtless moving back in with their parents. Other ex-workers surveyed (see the link) say that they have found that they can live more cheaply if they don’t have to pay for commuting, a wardrobe, and childcare expenses. Without those line items in the budget, they can live off of part-time or gig work. And the biggest number of workers who are opting out of their jobs consists of women, suggesting a return to one-income families, which may have salutary effects on child-raising.

UPDATE: So how does this relate to the doctrine of vocation? I don’t think that all vocations are permanent, since God can call us to other things. Nor is vocation just about how we make a living, our economic callings, since our vocations in the estates of family, church, and state are even more fundamental. Usually, we think of someone leaving one vocation when called to another. This is part of what is happening now. That includes women now feeling the call to leave the workplace to stay home with her children. But we are also seeing the repudiation of work altogether, just as we are seeing the repudiation of other vocations, such as marriage, parenthood, church member, and citizen.

*The unemployment rate is 5%, up from before the pandemic when it was only 3.5% in February, 2020, but lower than the 14.8% during the COVID lockdown in April. According to the Wall Street Journal at the linked article, much of the improvement comes from more and more Americans leaving the workforce completely. Only 61.7% of American adults are either working or seeking work, a drop from 63.4% in January, 2020, which amounts to some 3 million people who have dropped out of the job market and so are not counted in the unemployment figures.

Photo by Jessica Watson, via Flickr, Creative Commons 4.0 License. No alterations were made.

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