Matt Harrison and the Two Kingdoms

Confessional Lutherans are rejoicing at the election of the Rev. Matthew Harrison as the new president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. At long last, the United States will once again have a major denomination presenting itself to the world as traditionally Lutheran.

I expect the LCMS to once again take on a... well, Lutheran flavor now. The Means of Grace will, at least officially, once again be the tools Missouri officially endorses for sharing Christ and His blessings, instead of human marketing and psychological manipulation. Small groups replacing Word and Sacrament ministry as the focus of the congregation's life, "contemporary" worship, the Ablaze!(c) "movement," and suchlike will no doubt continue, but at least such Reformed-style resorts to human manipulation in the place of a Lutheran reliance on the Means of Grace in the promulgation of the Gospel will no longer have the Synod's official endorsement. Hopefully Ablaze!(c) will, to coin a phrase, come to have some "Lutheran substance," or else be phased out in favor of something that will. We can certainly do without the "Evangelical style" which has come to characterize the face Missouri shows the world. "Lex orandi, lex credendi," as St. Vincent of Lerins once famously remarked; "the law of prayer is the law of faith." We come to believe what we pray- and how we pray. Sooner or later "Evangelical style" becomes "Evangelical" substance- or lack thereof. If we worship like Baptists, and encourage our laity to think of themselves as a part of the "Evangelical" movement in the modern American rather than in the traditional Lutheran sense of the word "evangelical," then Baptists will be what they will become. Baptists, perhaps, with a high view of the Sacraments, but Baptists nonetheless.

We believe what we pray. Best to pray the words of Scripture, in the form handed down to us from the catacombs in the historic liturgy of the Western Church, and in musical forms suited to the dignity and the majesty of the subject matter. In music, too, "the law of prayer is the law of faith." We should not be surprised when the resort to praise bands leads to a view of Jesus as homeboy, just as when the use of the Lutheran chorale evokes a sense of Him as Lord and Savior. We should not be surprised when the bad theology of contemporary Christian music leads to misbelief, error, and spiritual misery.

But still, it must be said that, strictly speaking, musical style is an adiaphoron. So are small groups, and many of the other dubiously Lutheran innovations which have become common in Missouri over the past nine years and more. Praise bands may actually be of dubious utility in outreach, and counterproductive in the long run, but their use, per se, is not sinful. They are also less popular with those we would like to reach than their advocates maintain, and less useful in reaching them- but that is another story.

Hopefully that's the sort of thing President-elect Harrison had in mind when he said in his address to the convention just after being elected that "I will not coerce you." From everything I've heard of the new LCMS president, he is a persuader rather than a coercer, a healer rather than a warrior, a pastor rather than a pendant. Good for him. As one myself who sometimes has a tendency to shout and hurl anathamas when quiet persuasion would be both more effective and more appropriate, I can only admire that quality in Matt Harrison.

But not everything that has divided Missouri and American Lutheranism in the past several years can be dismissed as an adiaphoron. Outgoing President Gerald Kieshnick has, to his credit, been eloquent and forthright in speaking the truth in love to the ELCA, for example, on matters of human sexuality, and as an advocate for the unborn. But other issues are going to require something more than quiet persuasion. The widespread practice of open communion among LCMS congregations, representing not only a refusal to "walk together" with a Synod which remains committed to the apostolic practice of closed communion but a defiance of the salutary practice of the Church of the ages, is going to require more from the new LCMS presidium than evangelical persuasion.

I continue to be amazed how many Lutherans- and Lutherans who should know better- confuse Luther's distinction between God's Two Kingdoms with the separation of Church and State. Actually, it has far more to do with the distinction between Law and Gospel. While it's true that the Kingdom of the Right Hand- the Kingdom of Grace, where no coercion is required and the New Self freely serves God and neighbor out of spontaneous and wholly uncoerced love- is found only in the Church, the Kingdom of the Left Hand is found in the Church as well as in the State. The Church is the Kingdom of the Right only insofar as it consists of the New Selves of its members- the justus as opposed ot the peccator, the saint as opposed to the sinner. But alas, Christians are simul justus et peccator- at the same time saints and sinners. The error the ELCA makes when it mistakenly treats the Gospel in its narrow form- the doctrine of justification- as the "Gospel" of which the Seventh Article of the Augsburg Confession speaks when it says that is enough for the Church's unity that there be agreement on the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments is a deadly one. The Gospel of which Melanchthon writes is the Gospel in the broad sense- the Law as well as the Gospel. In practice, even the ELCA would not argue that the unity of the Church would not be disrupted by the participation of its members in genocide or their conscious and intentional embrace of racism, for example. Even the ELCA, in practice, embraces the presence within the Church of the Kingdom of the Left Hand as well as the Kingdom of the Right; any ELCA pastor who doubts this should try insisting publicly that 1 Timothy 2:12 means what it says with regard to the issue of women's ordination, or that words which are used throughout Greek literature to denote purely consensual sexual relationships between people of the same gender do not suddenly come to refer only to coercive ones when used by the Apostle Paul to describe behavior which excludes one from the Kingdom of God.

Rev. Harrison, as a pastor, will certainly have the responsibility to teach, to exhort, and to persuade. But the sorry confessional situation of the LCMS today calls for more than that. As synodical president, Rev. Harrison, the presidium as a whole, and the district presidents also have the responsibility to function in God's Kingdom of the Left Hand. When it comes to the practice of open communion, for example, or actual doctrinal deviation (as distinct from theologically dubious practices which strictly speaking can be defended as adiaphora), President Harrison will have to break the pledge President-elect Harrison made to the convention the other day. He is going to have to coerce. He is going to have to insist that it's going to be the Lord's way, or the highway.

And I have no doubt that he will. I have not the slightest doubt that when he promised not to coerce the people of the Missouri Synod, he was thinking of matters in which pastoral persuasion is an alternative to it consistent with his call.

When I was a pastor in the ELCA, I used to imagine that in confessional congregations both in Missouri and elsewhere it was, if not easy, at least practical for pastors to readily fulfill their responsibilities in the Kingdom of the Left Hand- the exercise of that precisely coercive authority which we would all like to avoid, but which sometimes cannot be avoided. I've written before in this blog of my admiration for my pastor at Grace in Chicago, the Rev. Roy Bleick, who- in the face of a blatantly racist decision by the parish school board not to admit a little girl to our parochial school because of the color of her skin, effectively placed us all under the interdict and refused to preside at communion until that sin was repented of and rectified. All of us like to imagine ourselves as courageous heroes standing up to evil in the Lord's Name and facing it down, the way Pastor Bleick did.

But it has many times fallen to me in my years as a pastor to speak the truth in love to those who have fallen into gross and public sin. There is nothing that is harder to do. And in this day and age, even our congregations- whatever they may confess about the Office of the Keys in principle- in practice are heavily influenced by a culture which echoes the words of the jury foreman who several years ago explained a verdict awarding a substantial sum in a lawsuit brought by a woman who had been quite appropriately excommunicated by her congregation for gross, public, and defiantly unrepented sin (though it should be noted that the congregation had handled the matter very badly): "I just don't see what business the Church has telling people how to live."

"Cracking the whip" can be hard. It can also sometimes not be the most effective way to handle a situation. In remembering Pastor Bleick's faithful stand against the corporate sin of our congregation, I also recall the story about St. Ambrose, who supposedly received a report that an presbyter was consorting at that very moment with a prostitute by leading the entire presbyteriate to the man's home, walking at a fast enough pace to outdistance them and making enough of a ruckus that the man and the prostitute saw him coming. Opening the door just a she took refuge within a trunk at the foot of the man's bed, Ambrose sat upon the trunk before ordering the presbyters to search the house for the woman- and then having failed, of course, to find her, had each one in turn shake the man's hand and humbly apologize for ever having thought him capable of such a thing.

One by one, they left. Finally Ambrose left, too- after knocking on the top of the chest, saying, "You can come out now," and departing without another word.

Throughout all my years in the parish, I hoped that some day I'd be that good. Regrettably, though, I never came close. I always struggled with the twin temptations to be a coward and a scold, and tried- awkwardly and not always successfully- to find a middle way.

In this age of the deified individual, in which private opinion is granted a degree of reverence once reserved for divine revelation, it isn't easy to do the job of pastoring in the Kingdom of the Left Hand. And as Dr. Quere, my seminary advisor, once pointed out, there would be something very wrong with any pastor who did not hate having to do it.

But it is part of the pastor's job. It has to be done precisely for the sake of the Gospel, which is only Good News in the face of the Bad News of the Law. And that's as true in the arena of doctrinal supervision as it is in the parish, serving as God's local source for the word of forgiveness and life we sinners so desperately need.

Why hasn't the Pope excommunicated all those pro-choice Catholic politicians? Probably for the same reason it's so hard for a faithful pastor these days to deal with a couple in the congregation whom he learns is living together only when they come to him- grudgingly- for pre-marital counseling. One is as gentle and as evangelical, in the best sense of the word, as one can be. The goal is to regain the sinner, not to cut him off.

But President Harrison, like every pastor, is going to find that sometimes he's not going to get to be evangelical. Sometimes, he's going to have to coerce. And he knows that. Every pastor finds it out very quickly, if he didn't know it going in.

One thing is sure: I wouldn't want the job Matt Harrison has just been elected to. Cleaning up the mess that is the Missouri Synod is a job I wouldn't wish on anybody, especially in a day in which biblical and theological ignorance combine so powerfully with the cult of individual freedom and choice to make even those of us who think of ourselves as committed Christians less willing than ever before to listen to pastoral persuasion.

No, I wouldn't want that job. But for that very reason, I'll pray that God helps him to be a the pastor we all are hoping for, and which the Missouri Synod so desperately needs- and the teacher, too. To be both, and at the same time, he is going to need all the prayers he can get.

God help you, Pastor Harrison. And God be with you.