For the time being

At the root of the divide between Lutheran and Reformed theology lies a deceptively subtle yet spiritually significant question: where, and how, does God make Himself known to the sinner in grace? Both traditions affirm the centrality of Scripture and the necessity of Word and Sacrament, but they differ in how they understand God's relationship to these means (and yes, I’m aware there is some controversy over using the term “means” of grace—as there always is, over every word). The short of it is this. The Lutheran confession holds that God has bound Himself, by His own promise, to the external Word and Sacraments—not because He is limited, but because He wills to be found there, reliably and concretely, by those who need mercy. The Reformed, by contrast, affirm that God is ordinarily present in these means, but not bound to them; He may work through them, or independently of them, in accordance with His sovereign will. Sovereignty is a word you will hear a lot in Reformed circles.

This theological distinction is not merely abstract. It shapes the mood and structure of worship, the language of assurance, and even the kind of joy each kind of Christian experiences. In a typical Reformed service, the liturgy often begins with a declaration of intent: “We gather to worship and serve the Lord.” The emphasis, then, falls on the community’s action in response to God’s glory. On the other hand. Lutheran liturgy begins with a “welcome to the Divine Service”. The worshiper is not addressed as one arriving to give, but as one summoned to receive. God is the active agent—speaking, giving, forgiving, feeding—while the worshiper’s first role is not initiative but reception.

This liturgical difference reflects deeper theological instincts. Reformed theology tends to express assurance through the inner witness of the Spirit and the evidence of sanctification. They’re not only checking for fruit of the Spirit (that would be a caricature), but they’re definitely doing that—a lot. Election is not merely a doctrine to be defended; it becomes an experience to be lived by seeing oneself grow spiritually. Many Reformed believers walk in real joy and spiritual confidence this way, freely singing of grace, speaking openly of God’s faithfulness, and resting securely in His eternal plan. When they zoom-out, so to speak, from their personal assurances of their salvation by checking the mirror for evidence of godliness, what I find to be a truly admirable assurance is theirs which rests on the entire arc of their lives—on promises confirmed by their love for truth, hunger for holiness, and perseverance in obedience.

Lutheran assurance, by contrast, is grounded not in the observable arc of the believer’s sanctification, or on a sort of immersion in biblical history, but in the ongoing reception of God’s mercy through concrete means. The Gospel is proclaimed, and the sinner hears, “You are forgiven.” The Sacraments are given, and Christ says, “This is my body… given for you.” These external signs are not mere symbols of grace; they are grace delivered. The result is a deep certainty, not based on spiritual progress, but on divine constancy. Yet this certainty often carries a more somber tone. Lutheran joy expresses itself as reverence, relief, or awe. The believer is one who returns again and again to the font, the pulpit, and the altar to be made whole—each time by grace alone.

This difference in posture—Reformed confidence and Lutheran contrition—is not a sign of stronger or weaker faith, but of differing theological imaginations. The Reformed tradition emphasizes God’s majesty and sovereignty, the unfolding of election, and the sanctification of a holy people. The Lutheran tradition emphasizes the present-tense encounter between the sinner and the forgiving God, the hiddenness of grace beneath word and water and bread, and the ongoing posture of repentance. Reformed communities often express assurance through visible trust and confidence; Lutheran communities through quiet reception and repeated return to absolution, often spoken in hushed tones.

Calvinism may well contain truer or fuller accounts of the inner logic of God’s dealings with humanity. Or maybe it doesn’t. But Lutheranism, with greater certainty, reflects what has already been given to us to believe and to do. Both traditions agree that it is not knowledge that saves. And I, for one, would rather build a life on the certainties that are revealed than attempt to fill in the spaces of mystery with logic alone.

Now, having given away my biases : I believe a spirit of receptivity, not grasping, guides both the Calvinist and the Lutheran to their respective insights. This is the posture of anyone led by the Spirit. I would gently challenge my Reformed brothers to consider this: what makes sense is not always true. The doctrine of the Trinity both makes sense and is true, and all its premises are drawn explicitly from Scripture. Limited Atonement, by contrast, may make sense—but the Lutheran argues that it might not be true, and most confessional Lutherans would insist that it is not. Perhaps the first step toward mutual understanding is to agree that no doctrine should be treated as foundational unless its premises are accepted by all Christians on biblical grounds, not merely inferred by logic.

Just because something can be deduced from Scripture doesn’t mean it ought to be taught. Even if Limited Atonement follows logically from premises we share, teaching it may inadvertently contradict other revealed doctrines. It may be more faithful to err on the side of caution than to force every inference into a system. To systematize theology is to assume there is a complete system available to us. But people, and their relationships to God, are not systems.

This raises the obvious objection: without connecting premises to conclusions, how would we arrive at doctrines like the Trinity? My answer is simple. The Trinity is eternally true; my logic is not. Whatever pertains to sanctification—being time-bound and unfolding—should be considered using criteria other than pure deduction. Deduction applies best to what is eternal. What is temporal and personal must be held more loosely.

Let’s take the example of sanctification. We can know the fact of sanctification from Scripture. But the state of our sanctification—its depth, the sincerity of our hearts—is known only to God. We cannot infallibly deduce the status when one of the parties is a time-bound and sinful creature. To do so would require inductive reasoning dressed up as deduction. But we are not given the future. We are given Christ, here and now.

The Church has always made a crucial distinction: we can be absolutely sure of God’s promise to finish what He started in us—that’s certitudo promissionis, the certainty of the promise. But we’re not given certainty about ourselves, about whether we’ll always cling to that promise or drift from it—that would be certitudo subjecti, certainty about the subject. And Scripture just doesn’t give us that. God gives perseverance along the way, through His Spirit working in Word and Sacrament. It’s not like He drops a lifetime supply of spiritual strength into your lap all at once. That’s why the Church keeps praying, “Lord, keep us steadfast,” because we’re confident in His faithfulness but honest about our weakness.

And that’s why we don’t presume to be more elect than Judas did. He walked with Christ. He heard the teaching, preached the kingdom, shared in the ministry, even received the Supper—and still, he fell. If Judas could feel secure and yet fall away, we dare not base our confidence on our own sense of nearness or spiritual vitality. The difference is not that we know something Judas didn’t about the hidden counsel of God. The difference is that we flee to what Judas abandoned: the living Christ, present in the Word, in Baptism, in the Supper.

So yes, we trust God to keep us, and we should—but that trust doesn’t lead to carelessness. If you put your confidence in God’s promise, you’ll be drawn to the very means by which He fulfills it. If you put your confidence in your imagined future state, you’ll grow careless. That’s not a small difference. It’s the difference between living in faith and falling into presumption. We speak boldly of God’s faithfulness, but we stay humble about tomorrow—because we haven’t been given tomorrow yet. We’ve been given Christ, again and again, today.

And when we see someone fall away—or when we read about Judas—we don’t puff ourselves up and say, “That would never be me.” No, we say, there but for the grace of God go I. But what grace do we mean? Not some abstract favor hovering over our heads. We mean the concrete grace of being given to hear the Word, to be brought to repentance, to be forgiven yet again, to return to Christ when we wander, and to be nourished in the faith not by deduction or projection, but by His gifts. That’s the grace that keeps us—and we cling to it not with pride, but with trembling gratitude.

This brings me to another point of tension between the Lutherans and the Calvinists that I think is entirely unnecessary. This one comes as a criticism from the latter camp—and, I believe, it’s based on a total misunderstanding of the Lutheran view of how and why Lutherans cling to Word and Sacrament as we do (baptism in this case).

Lutherans believe infants do not resist baptism. Calvinists will see in this teaching a loophole that opens up to a synergistic system. But this is completely mistaken. The Lutheran position doesn’t say: “Infants don’t resist, therefore grace works because of their posture.” It says: “God gives faith through His appointed means, and Scripture shows us He gives it to infants, who are described as receptive.” The lack of resistance is not the grounds for grace working; it is an observation based on revelation. Why not simply affirm: God ordained that infants cannot resist? Yes—and Lutherans can and often do say exactly that, in substance.

Why are infants saved through Baptism? Because God ordained it. He ordained not only the means (Word and Sacrament), but also the fit recipients, including the condition of infancy. This does not mean God saves them apart from means or outside of Christ—it means that God chose to show His glory precisely in the least, the weakest, those who could never boast of cooperation. The fact that they do not resist is not a systemic cheat—it is a divine ordering of grace, given where it is least likely to be confused with merit.

So why the argument? Because the Reformed system begins not with the means, but with the eternal decree—and reads grace always through the lens of particular election. For the Calvinist, if an infant is elect, God may regenerate them—but not necessarily through Baptism. Baptism is a sign and seal, not a giving; all resistance must be actively overcome by grace to be grace. Thus, when Lutherans say “infants do not resist,” the Reformed hear, “Then you’re making grace depend on the creature again!” But the Lutheran reply is simple: “No. We’re saying God gave Baptism, God gave the infant, and God gave the promise.

The Lutheran does not construct a system of non-resistance to protect sola fide; rather, he begins with the means of grace—where God has bound Himself, and he notes, from Scripture and pastoral reality, that infants do receive Christ without resisting. So we trust the Spirit has given them faith. Not because they cannot resist, but because God has not allowed them to. Not because of who they are, but because of who Christ is—gracious to the helpless.

The point of raising that issue is to show that yet another point of contention is simply due to a misunderstanding, and not due to an unbridgeable divide.

I choose to speak and live in a way that is distinctively Lutheran; I will not seek beyond what God has revealed; I will not move past the worship of Christ as Savior. & believe that a sanctified historical mind is not one that finds coherence in every pattern, but one that sees in history the marks of God’s patient self-revealing. The wise Christian seeks God where He has promised to be, and then marvels to discover that the Word speaks directly to our being—that we are, even now, caught up into the inner life of God through the death and resurrection of Christ.

But I don’t believe I’m closer to Christ on the grounds of what I consider to be a more accurate understanding of certain mysteries of faith.

Despite the structural and tonal differences, both traditions foster believers who live in real peace. It is easy to caricature the Reformed as confident to the point of presumption, or the Lutherans as somber to the point of doubt. But such caricatures fail. Reformed believers often walk in joy and confidence, rightly grounded in the promises of God and encouraged by the life of the community. Their comfort is not feigned. It flows from Scripture and grace. Likewise, Lutheran believers are not without joy; their joy simply takes a different form, one that clings to mercy in the midst of contrition and finds peace not in their progress but in God's faithfulness.

Both traditions wrestle honestly with the mystery of grace. Each points to Christ. Each exalts the Word. Each clings to the promise. The Reformed emphasize God’s sovereignty and glory as seen in the redeemed life; the Lutherans emphasize God’s nearness and mercy as encountered in the broken heart. The traditions are not the same. But they are looking for the same thing: to hold fast to the God who saves.

Do you not see, brothers and sisters, that your differences are not born of rebellion, but of reverence? The Lutheran doesn’t resist system out of laziness but out of a holy fear of stepping where God has not spoken. Likewise, the Reformed theologian does not construct doctrines out of pride but from a desire to let every conclusion be governed by God’s revealed character. You stop at different places; but you both stop. You fear different errors; but both your fears are born of the very same faith. You tremble before the holiness of God. You long to be faithful not only in what you declare but also in what you refrain from declaring. That is not division; it’s the mark of the same Spirit, whispering the same caution: Speak only what is given. And in what is not given: trust. So why, then, do you treat one another as if you serve different masters? Why must the Lutheran see Reformed joy as presumption, and the Reformed see Lutheran humility as doubt, when both are simply love, shaped under different burdens? Christ is not divided. And the Spirit who stills your tongues and orders your worship is one. You are not united because your doctrines align at every point; you really are united because you have both come to the edge of mystery and stopped—not from cowardice, but from reverence, stopped before the same burning bush, already together in Christ—even if you kneel on opposite sides of the mountain.

When both pulpits proclaim Christ crucified to the same Body of Christ in Spirit-filled congregations, and yet the table is withheld for doctrinal disagreements despite a mutual recognition of the Spirit in His believers, are we not artificially dividing by wars over words what God has joined by His Spirit? Are you really so vain and puffed-up to think that you have identified and understood the intellectual differences separating you from one another, to such a degree that you can judge them more important than keeping the Body of Christ, which you already see in your Reformed or Lutheran counterparts, divorced? The Supper is not about a shared confession drafted imperfectly by well-intentioned theologians; the Supper is about a shared ontology of being in Christ. The Word that should divide is the one we both worship; the words of confessions are always fallible. Why should they continue to divide what we know to be a common Body?

I can anticipate a response: “So let me ask you in return: if two people proclaim contradictory things about the Supper—if one says, “This is His true body,” and another says, “This is a symbol,”—what is the shared proclamation? There isn’t one. There is a contradiction in sacred speech, even if there’s union in Christ beneath it.”

But to that I’d answer that the shared proclamation is Christ. Let me give an example. When I hear the public confession of sins at my Reformed church and then Scripture is read to comfort the Reformed congregation, I lean over to my wife and add “and have confidence that your sins are indeed forgiven in Christ’s name”. Why? Because the Reformed Pastor leading us through that part of the liturgy didn’t have the confidence to say as much to her. His system wouldn’t allow it. But I still attend, and I still confess along side him despite his foibles. We’re all imperfect, aren’t we? So we confess Christ and share in his Body with the same hope for eternal glory.

Here’s another way of stating my reason to fellowship with both Lutherans and Calvinists:

God has not only ordained and redeemed history writ large with your name in his book of life but he also redeems you now in time. The stepping stones and the visible shore across the waters are equally good, true, and beautiful sources of comfort, joy, and presence.