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Thanksgiving for the Lutheran Reformation

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I’m nostalgic for 2017, a year filled with special commemorations of the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Thesis and the reforms of the church launched by that event. While most people today (October 31) are fixated on costumes for their kids, Halloween candy to give out, or creepy lawn decorations, I’m musing about Luther’s 1520 treatise The Freedom of a Christian (Quotations are from The Annotated Luther Study Edition, edited by Timothy J. Wengert, Fortress, 2016). Luther wrote: “In order to point out an easier way for common folk (for I serve only them), I am proposing two themes concerning the freedom and servitude of the spirit.”

The Christian individual is a completely free lord of all, subject to none.

The Christian individual is a completely dutiful servant of all, subject to all (488).

The remainder of Luther’s treatise shows how these paradoxical statements are both true. As a child and youth growing up in the Lutheran church, I heard a much greater emphasis on the first theme: the Christian is “completely free” and “subject to none” on account of one’s faith in Christ (not on one’s good works), and most of the preaching (that I recall, at least), centered on my future life with God in heaven, guaranteed by that faith in Christ. But having lived my entire adult life as a deaconess, with its emphasis on service, I revel in the interconnection of Luther’s two themes. Joyful service on behalf of others flows from the firm foundation of a person’s complete freedom through faith in Christ. Luther says it with greater eloquence in the second half of the treatise.

Up to now we have spoken about works in general and, at the same time, about those specific things that a Christian must do to train his or her own body. Finally, we will discuss those things done for one’s neighbor…. Thus, it can never happen that in this life a person is idle and without works toward one’s neighbors…. Nevertheless, no one needs even one of these works to attain righteousness and salvation. For this reason, in all of one’s works a person should in this context be shaped by and contemplate this thought alone: to serve and benefit others in everything that may be done, having nothing else in view except the need and advantage of the neighbor…. That is, with joy and love [faith] reveals itself in works of freest servitude, as one person, abundantly filled with the completeness and richness of his or her own faith, serves another freely and willingly (519-21).

Thanks be to God for the richness of Luther’s theology, that draws us into relationship with God through the person and work of Jesus and Christ, and then frees us for a life a service on behalf of others. Our world needs this message now, just as it did 500 years ago.

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Photo by Rhoda Schuler, 2024: Narthex floor of a Lutheran church in Colorado

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Images of Baptism: New Birth and Adoption

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To read Images of Baptism is a bit like being back in the classroom (as I was three decades ago) with Maxwell E. Johnson, whose teaching style was direct, straight forward, to the point, and thus quite engaging. His introduction to chapter 2, “Baptism as New Birth and Adoption,” begins by stating liturgical scholarship’s “accepted” evolution of baptismal theology in the early church: Eastern traditions had an emphases on regeneration, new birth, and adoption “rooted in Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan” and the West had a focus on “baptism as a ritual of death, burial resurrection in Christ” (Images of Baptism, 39). He continues, “To say that baptism as ‘new birth’ or adoption ‘by water and the Holy Spirit’ is only a characteristically Eastern image or focus, however, is simply incorrect…. The image of new birth and adoption is as much Western as it is Eastern” (42, emphasis in original).

Johnson’s goal is to expand our baptismal theology to include the full range of images and metaphors expressed in Scripture; as he says, “How one thinks of baptism will shape how one views Christian life and identity” (64). He succinctly summarizes the two primary images of baptism shaping Christian identity:

For one spirituality, baptism is the tomb in which the sinful self is put to death in Christ. For the other spirituality, baptism is the womb through which the Mothering Spirit of God give new birth and new life (64, emphasis in original).

In good Lutheran fashion, Johnson does not see these images as either/or but rather as both/and, embracing the seeming paradox of baptism as a sacrament that calls for the death of the sinner while at the same time declaring that the one being baptized is a beloved child of God. This latter image, with the baptism of Jesus as the paradigm, links Christians to the Incarnation, as Athanasius said, “God became what we are so that we could be made what he is” (quoted by Johnson, 64).

I close with two of the questions Max Johnson poses in this chapter (Images of Baptism, 64-65), inviting comments from you, the reader (a new feature to our blog posts).

What might it mean to say in our catechesis of parents who present their children for baptism, that in a real sense they are presenting “their” children for “adoption” into a whole new family network of relationships …?  

What might such [language] mean for the identity, nature and mission of the church in the world, empowered by the baptismal Spirit, which understands itself to be so closely united with Christ that, as the very body of Christ, it shares in the divine nature?

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Banner photo: Font at St. John’s Lutheran Church, Wheaton, Illinois. By Rhoda Schuler.