For the time being

I was on a walk through the neighborhood feeling a little anxious about why I was working on two projects: music and writing. Both take significant amounts of time and neither will have an audience. I turned the corner home and realized I was wondering about something I’d been doing rather than focusing on what God was doing.

The former mode of questioning will always be polluted by accusation and hopelessness; outside of Christ there is no redemptive arc to one’s life projects. The other mode of questioning tends in a more positive and affirming direction, not affirming myself, but affirming the happy Christian sense that there are answers to the questions I pose regardless of whether they’ve been revealed to me or not. This turning away as a mode is what draws me to Lutheranism. But we’ll arrive there much later.

The following are more than my thoughts on differences between Christian traditions studied piecemeal as if from a detached and academic view. What I have done here is to consider the philosophical frameworks, the theological systems, the personalities, the characters, the worldviews of Roman Catholicism, Confessional Lutheranism, and Reformed theology from within each stream. I’ve studied each as one who believed the truth of each for more than several years each. As I believed within that stream, the questions I asked all changed. There is a mode of thinking for each kind of believer.

The tradition I am perhaps finally settled into—i.e., my church—is Lutheran, but if readers are skeptical of or dislike Lutheranism: I may not have addressed the typical surface-level objections and concerns but I went deeper. There is much I want my fellow Lutherans to reconsider.

In what follows I deliberately use different styles when writing about Roman Catholicism, Reformed thought, and Lutheranism. The forme and le fond ought to match; so the style of writing corresponds to the topic: when I consider Roman Catholicism, bound up with my objection is the general sense that we have forgotten the horror of countless being spiritually bound and gagged. This wasn’t a war of words; the story needs to be told in a manner appropriate to the experience. For the Reformed and Lutheran histories, I match the form with the content. The Lutheran section is more or less a scholastic disputation, whereas the Reformed criticism includes concerns that go deeper, and the writing is meant to reflect as much.

ROMAN CATHOLIC THOUGHT

One of the missed details of history has been just how important the blood of martyrs is to defining the body of Christ, the Church. Historians have long sacrificed detail to the false gods of humanism and ecumenism, writing histories with a bloodless, academic detachment that doesn’t preserve the past but desecrates it, erasing centuries of bloody witness.

We should reject humanist Christian history, and reject Erasmus’s Christianity, which stays in the study, fearing the mob. I don’t despise Erasmus’s scholarship; I use it. But elegant letters don’t reconcile man to God. Modesty is not humility; it is unbelief dressed in manners.

Life is in the blood.

THE SPIRIT WHO DRAWS

To say Christ for us is to confess that no human work can save; to say Christ in us is to live in the Spirit who draws us into communion—“faith working through love”—the very proof we have passed from death to life in the bonds of a living Body.

The Spirit who joins Christians to the risen Lord never leaves the justified believer solitary. “I have been crucified with Christ… and Christ lives in me” is as real now as Calvary was then (Gal 2:20). The same Spirit who binds us to Christ binds us to Christ’s people. Scripture speaks of that bond as “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6) and declares “we know we have passed from death to life because we love the brothers” (1 Jn 3:14). The one made right with God is drawn into communion with those likewise reconciled. We are members of one Body, each living nerve-end connected to the same Head, feeling the pulse of the same blood.

Persistent disdain for the local church by a refusal to love, serve, or suffer alongside Christ’s body exposes a deeper question: has one been joined to Christ at all? I began with justification to make it clear that loving the church does not justify us; nevertheless, the justified will not stay aloof from her. The apostle who insists we are “justified by faith apart from works” also insists we are “one body in Christ,” and that “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’” (Rom 3:28; Rom 12:5; 1 Cor 12:21). Faith without love is not merely defective; it is a contradiction. The verdict that sets a sinner free binds him to a living body, or it binds him to nothing at all.

APPEARANCE, FRUIT, AND INTELLECTUAL ALLURE

By all appearances, she is the most representative Christian church across all domains of religiosity globally. She appears intellectually robust and aesthetically beautiful. The sight of a monk—head bowed, beads sliding through his fingers as he prays for strangers—strikes many of us as more Christlike than the ball-capped Protestant stocking shelves in a disaster relief warehouse which, with its fluorescent lights, forklifts, volunteers in jeans and work gloves, feels not only prosaic by comparison but less set apart, less holy.

Satan appears as an angel of light.

Paul’s portrait of the Spirit’s fruit has nothing to do with ecclesial identity or a cultivated look of holiness: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 5:22–23).

In the intellectual domain Roman Catholicism impresses at first as an edifice of marble logic. I continue to study Thomism for its shining façade: its devotees arranging jargon according to a geometry so flawless it dazzles, persuading the mind that as long as one finds more coherence along the path, one is therefore immersing himself more deeply into the Truth.

For a certain personality and a certain kind of mind, this intellectual palace welcomes us in; the invitation feels generous, yet the threshold conceals a condition. Those who enter surrender their native understanding of words now given tighter definitions; their under-formed consciences are handed in to be reshaped; lingering suspicions are turned on the convert himself as chief suspect. Who are you to rupture this beautiful and grand design? Objections are let go into a gaping hole at the center of the palace where syllogisms dissolve them by anticipation.

HIDDEN PREMISES AND THE DOGMA MACHINE

Premises Without Scripture: Marian Doctrines

Analytical precision can shelter any conclusion, so long as the premises remain hidden.

Rome mastered the technique. Syncretic devotions swelled first and dogma followed, like a notary sealing a letter already sent. When late fourth-century preachers began swooning over Mary’s perpetual virginity, the Gospels’ blunt references to Jesus’ “brothers” threatened the rising tide of veneration. Jerome’s apologetic ingenuity did not deny that adelphos means “brother” in Greek—Koine already had anepsios for “cousin” (Col 4:10)—but reinforced a reinterpretation already circulating in apocrypha and early commentaries: the “brothers” were cousins, sons of another Mary, the wife of Clopas. What began as an instinct to protect Mary’s purity became an exegetical necessity. Jerome sharpened the genealogical workaround into a formal defense, redrawing the family tree to preserve the doctrine without explicit Scriptural support. Today’s Catholic apologists often cite Hegesippus, Epiphanius, or the Protoevangelium of James, but these are late, apocryphal, or both. The exception became rule, not because Scripture required it, but because the rising cult of Mary could not endure contradiction.

THE DOGMA MACHINE

Buried premises, wrought by imagination disconnected from reality, outran memory and record. The feast of Mary’s conception appeared in the East by the seventh century and spread westward long before anyone attempted to define it dogmatically. Duns Scotus then supplied “preservative redemption” to reconcile the belief with original sin; three centuries of sermons embroidered the loophole into a banner; Pius IX swung the banner into a thunderbolt; exegetes scurried back to Luke’s salutation to squeeze kecharitōmenē into a prenatal absolution. The feast predated Scotus, but his scholastic argument transformed a pious intuition into a theological claim and, under pressure of devotion, into an article of faith.

The Assumption stretched the method further. No apostle spoke of it. No grave was empty save Christ’s. The earliest surviving homilies by Juvenal of Jerusalem and John of Damascus are late, legendary, and theologically motivated. Yet by the fifth century the Dormition was a liturgical feast in Jerusalem, with earlier traces in Syriac tradition. Typology did the heavy lifting. If the Ark vanished, surely the living Ark must soar higher; if Enoch and Elijah were translated, how not the Theotokos? Fitness replaced fact; the rhyme of symbols was promoted to history. No apostolic record, no Scriptural word—only the inertia of liturgy and the imaginative logic of exalted veneration.

UNDER THE MARBLE

Although silent premises kept the intellectual palace looking clean to most onlookers, there was always a tell for the true Christian—and the true Christian paid dearly for noticing. While syllogisms fluttered skyward, another engine clanked below. From the bull Ad extirpanda under Innocent IV (1252) to the last Spanish execution for heresy in Valencia (1826), Rome choreographed torment as liturgy. Ad extirpanda codified the use of torture within inquisitorial procedure, with limits meant to preserve life but not limb, a formality that turned cruelty into policy. Manuals of the Holy Office detailed how high to hoist a suspect until ligaments tore but bones did not snap, how much water to pour before the chest convulsed.

Modern archival research places total executions under the Spanish Inquisition at roughly three to five thousand across three and a half centuries—far fewer than lurid legends, yet monstrous in reality. The Roman Catholic Church owes a grim debt to inquisitors who perfected religious coercion, marrying sacramentology to strangulation. In vaulted, heaven-pointing chambers a linen toca was thrust down a prisoner’s throat and water followed until the chest convulsed. Streets outside filled with processions of the condemned beneath banners of the Virgin. Families could purchase a “merciful” garrote before the fires were lit, priced on a sliding scale of indulgence. The spectacle was hailed as a work of mercy: error cauterized for the good of souls.

Not even the intelligent or devout were spared. Jan Hus traveled under imperial safe conduct only to feel the pyre’s breath; Savonarola’s ashes fed the Arno; Bruno’s tongue, gagged with iron, could not cry that the universe might be larger than Aristotle allowed. Galileo aged under house arrest, obliged to kneel where others burned and whisper that the earth stands still while it hurtles through darkness unhindered by anathema.

Purgatory began as a vague hope that mercy might pursue the dead, then hardened into a commercial furnace. As soot from burning conversos coated Spanish tiles, pennies clinked into indulgence chests to shorten imaginary years in imaginary flames—licensed by councils that stitched together stray verses as a tailor patches velvet, sure the garment would shine because scholastic gold thread described each seam.

These days, in debate halls and online, Roman apologists mock the idea of a Body of Christ not coextensive with a powerful institution. But if the Roman Catholic Church as an institution has always been the Body of Christ, then Christ’s Body designs its own torture. Christ’s Body drowns itself. Mothers clutch their children as icy currents close over their faces, and the Spirit within Him thrashes for breath even as His own Church presses down until the bubbles stop rising.

Is this the Body you love? These were not parentheses in Church history; this was the Roman heartbeat through half the Christian era. The last Spanish execution—schoolteacher Cayetano Ripoll in Valencia, 1826—was carried out by civil authority at the request of the Junta de Fe, decades after the Inquisition’s formal abolition. Yet its logic lingered. The institution that now waves away these centuries as “excesses” is the same that claims immunity from error in defining faith and morals. The smell of scorched hair still clings to its garments, and the rationalizations for torture still polish new doctrines to mirror finish.

INFALLIBILITY, CHRIST, AND THE WORD

Nor can the indictment be waved aside by the familiar dodge that “the office remains infallible while the men who hold it may sin.” From the moment popes sealed Ad extirpanda and, later, Exsurge Domine (1520), the rack, the stake, and confiscation of goods were no longer private lapses but exercises of the Roman see’s jurisdiction; the arm turning the windlass wore the Fisherman’s Ring. Discipline is a mode of teaching; Augustine treats the Church’s judicial sentences as an extension of the pulpit (Contra Cresconium 3.51). Acts performed in nomine Ecclesiae and ratified by councils are not peccata personarum but delicta concilii, corporate crimes. When decrees forbid the chalice to the laity, chain the vernacular Bible, or brand justification by faith a heresy, the communion that wields the sword takes on the likeness of the Antichrist who “exalts himself over everything called God” (2 Th 2:4). We cannot call the persecutor the persecuted, nor claim that the jailer and the martyr share the same Body. Judas severed himself; he did not remain mysteriously united to the very One he betrayed. To equate the Roman institution with the mystical Body collapses the sinless Head into sinful members, mistaking human presumption for divine presence.

Here the deeper issue surfaces: the Word speaks; it is not a mute record awaiting a magisterium to give it voice. Either Scripture is the living Word, or it is merely words about the Word, subject to revision by an authority that stands above it. Rome’s system requires the latter. Once the magisterium is enthroned above the text, it can never be tested by the text, only by itself. Thus either the magisterium erred—proving infallibility false—or the believer must privately judge Rome trustworthy—proving that private judgment is indispensable. In both cases the Roman claim collapses. There is no third way.

All of this brings us to the crux of Rome’s theological position, its claim to infallible mediation of Christ’s gifts.

CHRIST IS NOT DIVIDED

Rome often says, “Our separated brethren have the whole Christ—yet they are missing how Christ meant to give Himself.” This is a contradiction dressed in velvet. Christ is not divided. To possess Him is to possess Him as He is, not by approximation, not by mere resemblance, but in fullness. These apologists suggest that Christ’s gifts are mediated only through certain divinely instituted forms—apostolic succession, episcopal hierarchy, a full sacramental system. But what can be added to the One in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily (Col 2:9)? If the Spirit of Christ dwells in a man, then Christ Himself is present, and with Him union with His death, resurrection, ascension, and reign.

Rome speaks of “fullness” the way a bureaucracy speaks of process: more steps, more offices, more paperwork, then you will have the real thing. The New Testament says otherwise. It does not say, “You have Christ, but not in fullness until you assent to papal infallibility, venerate relics, recite the rosary, and acknowledge a treasury of merit.” It says, “You have been filled in Him” (Col 2:10). Not filled in Peter. Not filled in tradition. Not filled in Rome. In Christ. The “fullness” Rome offers is not abundance; it is obstruction. It is the gospel with a gag order, grace with a customs office.

They say, “But how do you know? Without Rome, who can interpret Scripture?” The sheep know His voice (Jn 10:27). The Word of God is not a puzzle box requiring papal keys. It is living and active. The Spirit opens it to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, not only to those who can trace lineage through episcopal paperwork.

WHERE THE CHURCH IS FOUND: HIDDEN YET VISIBLE

So if not in Rome, where is this Church—this Body that loves, suffers, and endures in Christ?

The Church I love is found in the fellowship of those who cling to Christ where He has promised to be. Indefectibility adheres to the Word, not to any single episcopal throne. I cannot step inside the Roman palace, however radiant its marble, knowing what foundations lie beneath.

We confess—not in abstraction, but in joy—that the Church is not a relic of apostolic succession, but a living communion formed by the Word and sustained by the Sacraments. The Church is present wherever the Word is rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered. That makes the Church visible with clear boundaries. Hence we reject an “invisible Church” conceived as a merely spiritual unity that ignores concrete, sacramental communion.

At first glance, our position can look self-contradictory. We deny that the Church subsists as an invisible entity spread across bodies lacking sacramental fellowship, because genuine unity requires a shared confession and common participation in the Lord’s Supper. Yet we acknowledge that members of Christ’s Body can be found in denominations that do not share that communion. Does this concede that the Church exists wherever Word and Sacrament are present, even across institutional divides—a view that sounds like the very invisible-Church theory we reject?

The tension dissolves once we distinguish invisible from hidden. Invisible suggests a non-entity, an abstraction. Hidden affirms a real, though not fully perceived, unity. Our theologians feared that calling the Church invisible would detach it from the concrete, sacramental life through which the Spirit actually works.

At 3 a.m. on a Tuesday the Church endures: her members scattered, sleeping, or alone, yet bound by the same Spirit who unites them to Christ in Word and Sacrament. This hiddenness is no disembodied concept; it flowers visibly in the gathered assembly where Christ forgives, heals, and sanctifies through His means of grace.

This logic carries us to the Real Presence. The God who walked in Eden, spoke from the bush, passed through Abraham’s sacrifice, and shed His blood at Calvary is not absent now. He is not the distant God of philosophers. The prophets foretold a Shepherd-King who would feed His flock and bind up the brokenhearted (Isa 61:1–3; Ezek 34:23–24). Fulfillment comes in the Incarnation: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1:14). The God who once passed between torn pieces of sacrifice now gives His own torn flesh for the life of the world (Isa 53:5).

The incarnational, covenantal nature of God’s relationship with His people continues into the present. Without this real presence, the most immediate and undeniable experience we have is the brokenness of the world—the fact of sin, suffering, and death. These evils would then define the Church itself. But no. The true Christian Church does not endure by doing violence to minds, bodies, and souls. She endures because her Shepherd still walks among us and still gives Himself: “This is my body, given for you” (Lk 22:19).

NOT LIKE ROME

Even if Lutheran sacramental theology is right, that judgment does not drain Christ’s fullness from credobaptists, Congregationalists, Anabaptists, Presbyterian Calvinists, Methodists, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, or the Eastern churches. The Church I love has members in every one of them. Lutheranism is no “leakier” vessel than Rome, nor Rome a tighter one. Emil Brunner reminds us: “The Church exists by mission, just as a fire exists by burning. Where there is no mission there is no Church; and where there is neither Church nor mission, there is no faith” (Brunner, The Word and the World). He presses further: Rome imagines Protestants are trying to reconstruct the substance of her institution, when the real aim is to recover the New Testament ekklesia that precedes every later structure. We do not covet Rome’s marble chassis; we seek the living communion that the Word itself calls into being. For the Word speaks; it is not a mute record awaiting a magisterium.

A Roman Catholic might finally respond, “I’m Catholic because I love Jesus. I love communing with others who love Him. The traditions draw me nearer to God. I’m nourished by the Church’s intellectual breadth, the beauty of her arts, the love poured out by the saints and religious orders.” To all of that, amen. I would preserve it and name it as gift. But leave behind what is false: oaths to error, blindness to blood, communion with powers that mock the very Christ you seek. Let go, and you will be freer in the love you already know, more unburdened in the truth you already walk toward, and more whole in the Body to which you already belong.

Some may object that I have been uncharitable in my portrayal of Rome—that I have dwelt too long on her crimes and too little on her saints. But it is not uncharitable to tell the truth. Charity does not conceal wounds; it tends them in the light. To describe torture and corruption plainly is not to despise the Body of Christ but to deny that the institutional body which inflicted such harm is that Body. The Spirit’s life cannot be identified with the machinery that stifled it. Yet even there, among the ruins of power, the true Church endured—the faithful who clung to Christ despite their bishops. To speak this way is not hatred, it’s the conviction that holiness outlives its own defilers because it comes from the Word who still breathes life into His people.

REFORMED THOUGHT

At the root of the divide between Lutheran and Reformed theology lies a deceptively subtle yet spiritually decisive question: Where, and how, does God make Himself known to the sinner in grace?

The answers shape not only doctrine but the entire feel of Christian life—its worship, its assurance, even its joy. In a typical Reformed service the liturgy opens, “We gather to worship and serve the Lord.” The accent falls on human response to divine majesty. A Lutheran liturgy begins instead, “Welcome to the Divine Service.” Here God is the acting subject: He speaks, gives, forgives, and feeds; the worshiper’s first posture is reception, not initiative.

This contrast of posture reveals the deeper instinct. Reformed assurance seeks confirmation in the inner witness of the Spirit and in the visible fruit of sanctification. Election is not merely confessed but traced in the mirror of experience—spiritual growth as evidence that one belongs to the decree. Many Reformed believers live in real joy this way, singing of grace, trusting Providence, and resting in an eternal plan. Yet their confidence often arcs back toward the self, measuring God’s faithfulness by their own perseverance.

Lutheran assurance anchors not in the arc of sanctification but in God’s continuing address. When the Gospel is proclaimed, the sinner hears, You are forgiven. When the Supper is given, Christ says, This is my body … given for you. These are not emblems of grace; they are grace delivered. God’s mercy is one eternal act—unchanging in Him, received by us through time. Each moment of hearing and tasting is that same eternal pardon entering history again for our sake.

Calvinism seeks certainty by locating grace in an eternal decree “before time began.” But to place forgiveness wholly in the past tense of eternity is to risk removing it from the living encounter. The Word that should address the sinner now—I forgive you—becomes the procedural enactment of a plan. The drama of mercy in time is flattened into the calm of foreordination.

The difficulty lies in confusing eternity with duration. When the Reformed say God decided “before time,” they mean to magnify sovereignty, yet “before” is still a temporal term. Eternity, as the Fathers and scholastics taught, is not endless succession but the simultaneous whole of life—totum simul (Augustine, Confessions 11; Aquinas, ST I q10). In God there is no earlier or later; His willing and knowing are one act. Thus the Lutheran refuses to rank “orders of decrees.” When Scripture says God chose us “before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:4), it speaks analogically: His will toward us is unconditioned by time, not sequential within it.

Here the Church distinguishes two kinds of certainty. We possess certitudo promissionis, the sure promise that God will finish His work in us (Phil 1:6). But we are not granted certitudo subjecti, infallible knowledge about ourselves apart from that promise (1 Cor 10:12). The Reformed attempt to close this gap by self-inspection; the Lutheran keeps eyes fixed on the external Word.

The same tension surfaces in baptism. Lutherans say infants “do not resist” the grace given there. Calvinists suspect synergism: “If lack of resistance matters, grace depends on posture.” But the Lutheran claim is descriptive, not causal. God gives faith through His appointed means, and Scripture shows He gives it even to infants (Mk 10:14; Acts 2:39). Their non-resistance is not merit but manifestation of sheer gift. Grace operates where boasting is impossible. The Reformed, starting from election rather than means, cannot follow: if an infant is elect, God may regenerate him—but not necessarily through baptism. Hence the charge of “synergism.” The Lutheran answer remains simple: God gave baptism, God gave the child, God gave the promise. That suffices.

Faith the size of a mustard seed receives the whole Christ as surely as the strongest saint’s trust. When believers neglect Word and Sacrament, faith still lives though malnourished—salvation intact but comfort diminished. Lutheran theology distinguishes salvation from assurance: God preserves, yet He gives peace only where He has pledged to meet us.

From here the Reformed habit of reasoning extends into cosmology. Patristic and medieval teachers—Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Gerhard—understood “death through sin” (Rom 5:12; 1 Cor 15:21) to mean human death. Creation’s “groaning” (Rom 8:22) signified corruption and disorder, not the first onset of animal mortality. Augustine pictured thorns, toil, disease, and rebellion in nature as marks of futility, not proofs that beasts had once been immortal. Aquinas agreed: animals were mortal by kind; the curse made the world hostile to man, not newly perishable. The Lutheran orthodox continued this reading. Luther’s Lectures on Romans interpret futility as creation’s frustration in serving man. Gerhard calls it “corruption and resistance.” Pieper later affirms the same.

Seventeenth-century Reformed scholasticism, especially Francis Turretin (Institutes 9.7), altered the picture. Viewing Adam as federal head of all creation, Turretin extended the curse to include animal death itself. That development hardened through later Calvinists and finally modern Young-Earth Creationism. Whitcomb and Morris’s Genesis Flood (1961) declared that if animals died before Adam, “the gospel collapses.” Thus the entire fossil record had to fit inside post-Fall history, forcing ad hoc physics—global cataclysm, accelerated nuclear decay, vapor canopies—all to preserve a dogma unknown to the Fathers.

Hence the “heat problem.” If radioactive decay, tectonic shift, and meteor impact were compressed into a single year, the released energy would have vaporized oceans and melted crust. Each decay event emits a fixed quantum of heat; compressing billions of years of events into days multiplies temperature beyond survivable limits. Faith cannot be saved by violating thermodynamics.

The issue is not youth of the earth but bondage of faith to models. Lutheran theology affirms creation, fall, and flood as divine acts but refuses to hinge belief on speculative mechanics. Miracles are confessed, not diagramed. Luther laughs at philosophers who demand the “how.” Chemnitz distinguishes ordinary providence from extraordinary act. Gerhard keeps Romans 5 focused on human death. When models replace confession, collapse of the model drags faith with it. Better a humble confession than a brittle theory.

Genesis 1:29–30 does say God gave plants for food to man and beast. Luther reads it as generosity, not zoological law. Gerhard warns against deducing universal vegetarianism from it. Pieper concurs: the verse witnesses God’s provision, not the impossibility of predation. Historic Lutheranism thus remains free to confess a young creation without binding conscience to pseudoscience.

The Resurrection is our measure. We do not explain it by biology; we confess it by witness. Likewise, creation is miracle, not mechanism. When miracles are forced into natural models, the models collapse; when confessed as divine acts, faith endures.

Faith itself is likewise miracle, not mechanism. It truly happens in you—it is your act of trusting Christ—yet that act is wholly caused by the Word that creates it. “Faith comes by hearing” (Rom 10:17) describes what God does. You breathe because He has already given air and life. Calling faith your act does not make it a work; it is grace taking form in you. The Gospel does not find capacity and request its use; it finds death and raises it. The cry “I believe” is resurrection speech.

Here Lutheranism and Reformed theology part again. The Reformed describe faith as habitus, a created quality infused into the soul that endures as latent power. The Lutheran sees faith only as living relation—event, not faculty. It exists in hearing, not storage. To call it a habitus implies it can self-subsist; to call it relation means it lives only from the continual Word. Reformed grace is implanted principle; Lutheran grace is present communion.

Hence the Reformed man lives by a system; the Lutheran, by a conversation or relationship. One guards a decree; the other listens to a voice. Faith as habit can be inspected; faith as hearing can only be received. For the Lutheran, the believer is one in whom the Creator is presently speaking, and whose believing is nothing other than the echo of that speech. Faith, then, is not stored vitality but living dependence; not a candle kept burning in the soul, but the light that appears whenever the Word is spoken. To call it a habitus would imply the fire keeps itself alive. The Lutheran insists instead that the flame burns only because air and spark are continually supplied.

Out of this flows two metaphysics of being. For the Reformed, creation endures because God’s once-for-all decree sustains it—a legal continuity. For the Lutheran, creation exists because God’s Let there be still sounds—an ongoing presence. Decree produces order; utterance produces life. In the first, providence is management; in the second, mercy. Thus annihilation becomes conceivable only within the Reformed frame: if being results from a decree, the decree could be rescinded. Within the Lutheran frame, annihilation would mean God unspeaking Himself, impossible to a faithful Creator whose “Yes” (2 Cor 1:20) endures.

In the Reformed world God relates as ruler to subject; in the Lutheran world as lover to beloved. Decree yields distance; presence yields communion. Reformed love is decision; Lutheran love is nature. The Reformed say, God loves because He wills; the Lutheran says, He wills because He loves.

Even human love echoes this ontology. “ You complete me ” sounds idolatrous under a theology of decree, but true under a theology of communion. We are created relational, imaging the Triune exchange of giving and receiving. Marriage itself becomes the continuation of God’s creative Word—two lives through which the divine Yes is heard anew. The Reformed can describe it as covenant order; the Lutheran hears it as living speech.

Therefore I remain Lutheran. The Reformed honor God’s might but place the creature forever at a distance, existing by permission. The Lutheran beholds glory in nearness, power in fidelity. To exist at all is grace—the unrevoked Let there be still sounding through all that is. In that light, even the human cry “You complete me” becomes doxology: we live, move, and have our being because the divine Word still speaks (Acts 17:28).

LUTHERAN THOUGHT

Now a word of caution for my Lutheran brothers and sisters.

Let us reconsider our identity as Lutheran Christians and the proper status of the Lutheran Confessions, the Book of Concord chief among them. Within certain circles there is a tendency, often unconscious, to elevate the Confessions almost to the level of Scripture. Yet our identity is first in Christ, and only secondarily as Lutheran. Lutheranism is not an end in itself; it is a faithful way of understanding, living, and worshiping as a Christian. The Confessions are trustworthy words from good pastors, not a second canon.

Scripture alone remains divinely inspired and infallible. Because the Confessions faithfully echo biblical truth, they reliably convey infallible doctrine (Formula of Concord, Epitome, “Summary, Rule and Norm”). Still, as human writings, they are not themselves infallible. Recognizing this prevents us from giving confessional documents the kind of authority that belongs only to the Word of God. This distinction does not invite instability; it guards humility. Subscription to the Confessions involves a solemn quia commitment—because they agree with Scripture—yet that commitment presupposes Scripture’s prior authority.

This calls for careful theological reasoning. Every doctrine engages concepts, distinctions, and language shaped by human history. Scripture itself uses metaphor, argument, and abstraction; therefore theological reflection must also use reason. Philosophy in this sense is not alien to theology but its servant. The Confessions themselves employ philosophical tools—Aristotelian categories, distinctions of substance and accident, person and nature—to clarify mystery without pretending to master it.

Philosophy serves theology well when it clarifies the content of revelation; it corrupts theology only when foreign assumptions distort that content. Properly used, reason is an instrument of fidelity, not rebellion. Misuse of reason does not invalidate its use any more than bad preaching invalidates preaching. Our minds, though fallen (1 Cor 2:14), are redeemed in Christ and renewed to serve truth (Rom 12:2).

This balanced approach avoids two extremes: naïve suspicion of reason on one hand and restless revisionism on the other. Doctrinal truth is stable and objective; human articulation of that truth may always be refined in understanding, though rarely in wording. Interpretive refinement does not equal textual revision. Revision would be necessary only if a real doctrinal flaw were discovered. Absent that, the text stands.

History illustrates the distinction. The Nicene Creed changed only to repel Arianism, not because reflection had matured. The same principle governs the Lutheran Confessions: they might require amendment only upon proof of doctrinal error, never merely for conceptual polish. Openness to reflection safeguards, rather than threatens, confessional stability.

Thus the problem in some confessional circles is not the Confessions themselves but the posture toward them. To treat them as unassailable or immune from deeper reflection risks confusing human witness with divine revelation. The Confessions derive authority from their fidelity to Scripture; they do not lend authority to Scripture. Recognizing that derivative nature protects us from both fundamentalism and antiquarian traditionalism.

All theology involves philosophical reasoning, whether admitted or not. To pretend otherwise is to imagine a “pure” biblical Christianity detached from all history—a restorationist fantasy. Lutheran theology avoids that trap by acknowledging its historical mediation. It stands consciously within the great tradition shaped by Augustine, scholastic discipline, and Reformation clarity. Its norm is Scripture (norma normans); its confession is the faithful normed expression (norma normata). Maintaining that hierarchy keeps us sane.

Here, then, is the danger I see: we rightly revere the Confessions but risk idolatry by treating them as Scripture; we distrust philosophy yet depend on it to explain our own doctrines. Recognizing this tension is the first step toward health. Our goal is not to loosen our identity but to keep it oriented toward Christ. Theology lives only when reason, humbled under the Word, remains a clear instrument for the Church’s praise.

Acknowledging that the Confessions are human does not relativize them. It simply prevents us from baptizing human finitude as divine speech. Fear of liberal drift should not drive us into denial of our own humanity. To call the Confessions human is not to call them unreliable; it is to remember that only one Word is God-breathed.

Even now we read them through lenses shaped by centuries of reflection. Every generation discovers small imperfections in phrasing or emphasis, none fatal but all reminders that we are still learners. The integrity of confessional Lutheranism lies precisely in this humility. Like the Nicene fathers, we know revision is permissible only to correct real error. Interpretive refinement, however, is perpetual and healthy. Stability comes not from freezing the text but from trusting the Word to which it points.

Confessional Lutherans therefore can and should engage philosophical reflection without anxiety. To think deeply is not to betray the faith; it is to honor the God who made us thinking creatures. Scripture remains the sole infallible norm; the Confessions remain the faithful witness; philosophy remains the servant that clarifies without ruling. Such a hierarchy guards the Church from both sterile literalism and fashionable drift.

THE FREE-FLOATING LUTHERAN MAN

Lutheranism may feel hollow because, though it locates Christ perfectly in Word and Sacrament, it does not always locate us—our place within the unfolding story of redemption. Calvinism offers the drama of a sovereign plan; Rome and the East offer the solidity of visible institutions. Lutheranism sometimes leaves believers knowing where grace is but not who they are inside it.

The desire for belonging is not sin in itself. Many have sought to feel “part of God’s story” by clinging to visible power or cultural success. Yet the Christian story is the grain of wheat that falls into the earth and dies (Jn 12:24). The victory is hidden under thorns, weakness, and rejection. We do not deny God’s eternal counsel, but we do not preach it; we preach Christ crucified. We do not direct the sinner to decipher providence but to hear absolution. We point not to decrees but to the Man on the cross and say: There—for you. That is your place in the story, received, not guessed.

The Calvinist may feel swept up in the divine plan but still wake at night wondering, “Was I truly written into it?” Assurance built on glimpsing one’s line in God’s script is always uncertain. Better to be the beggar who knows Christ came for beggars than the prince who fears his coronation was imagined.

Yet the hollow feeling should not be ignored. Assurance must be nourished not only by declaration but by the Spirit’s indwelling. “Examine yourselves, whether you be in the faith,” Paul writes (2 Cor 13:5). The Spirit does bear witness with our spirit (Rom 8:16). To recognize that witness is not enthusiasm; it is comfort. We need not base faith on feelings, but we must not deny that faith feels. When a man walks with God, he knows it—not in fireworks but in the slow work of sanctification, love, and repentance.

If we ask to know our place in God’s history, we are already praying; and if we are praying, the Spirit is already interceding. The hollow space may be the chamber where mercy’s echo resounds most clearly.

A DEMONSTRATION OF HOW TO LOVE CONFESSIONAL BOUNDARIES RIGHTLY

Let us make room within confessional Lutheranism for the annihilationist.

The Augsburg Confession says “everlasting punishment,” not “everlasting torment.” To insist on conscious torment as essential is to go beyond our subscription. Paradoxically, it belittles God’s holiness to imagine that eternal separation from Him is somehow less dreadful than eternal fire. If His presence is the highest good, His absence is the greatest possible horror. The worst of Hell is not heat but the eternal No from the lips of Him whose Yes gives life.

Some object: “The authors of the Confessions surely believed in eternal conscious torment, even if they did not write it.” Perhaps—but people rarely know the limits of their own claims. Even if Melanchthon himself held an infernalist view, we do not import private opinion into confessional text. As Scripture interprets Scripture, so the Confessions are read by their words, not by conjecture about their authors’ psychology. The Confessions witness to Scripture; they are not new revelation. To read them otherwise is to turn testimony into commentary.

The confessors claimed no infallibility, only submission to the Word. We receive their documents as faithful echoes of Scripture, not as a second canon of private beliefs. The authority of a confession rests in its fidelity to the Word it expounds, not in the incidental assumptions of its writers. Assuming an immortal soul or fiery mechanics of Hell and then reading those assumptions back into the text reverses the interpretive order.

So what must confessional Lutherans believe about Hell? The Confessions, grounded in Augsburg XVII and the Athanasian Creed, bind us to five essentials:

1. Christ will return bodily for a universal resurrection of the dead.

2. He will render a final and righteous judgment.

3. The justified will enjoy everlasting life with God.

4. The impenitent will suffer everlasting punishment, described as “eternal fire” or “eternal death.”

5. This final division will never be undone.

Beyond these, the Confessions bind nothing further. They do not require a mechanism explaining how the wicked continue to exist, a literalist reading of all imagery, or a portrayal of God as delighting in retribution. They affirm duration and gravity, not speculative detail.

Common objections fall quickly:

“If punishment is eternal, consciousness must be eternal.” Not necessarily. The biblical terms—death, fire, darkness—signify irreversible loss and exclusion, not the physiology of suffering. The permanence of judgment, not its sensory quality, is what Scripture stresses.

“If you relax infernalism, you weaken judgment.” No. Symbolic language in Scripture heightens, not softens, reality. To refrain from over-specifying Hell is not timidity but obedience. Revelation stops where mystery begins.

“Conditional or annihilationist readings contradict the Confessions.” Only if they deny finality. Any view that preserves eternal judgment and the irrevocable verdict stands within the confessional bounds. What one may not teach is restoration after the Last Day.

Thus the Lutheran position guards the seriousness of judgment without enthroning cruelty as divine attribute. The last word belongs to the One who bore judgment in our place. Hell is real and final, but the focus of faith remains the cross, not the flames.

Now that space has been made for the annihilationist, we can affirm the deeper reason many Lutherans nonetheless reject annihilation: a metaphysical conviction about creation itself.

If existence is the ongoing act of God’s will—His continuous Let there be—then annihilation would mean God un-speaking what He once spoke. Creatio continua teaches that all being endures because God’s Word still sustains it: “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). To annihilate would imply reversal within God’s own will, a change incompatible with His faithfulness.

Therefore the Lutheran regards annihilation as metaphysically impossible, not merely morally repugnant. God’s “Let there be” is no transient command but an eternal presence. His freedom is the freedom to remain faithful. What He has once called good He does not un-create.

A final word on a poison that is especially prevalent among Lutherans. Lutheran suspicion of intellectualism has deep historical roots, often marked by a lack of self-awareness. From the seventeenth century onward, Lutheran orthodoxy frequently warned against “abstraction from Scripture” as the pathway to heresy—yet the very act of interpretation presupposes abstraction. Similarly, while Lutheran thinkers from Melanchthon to Chemnitz and Gerhard engaged philosophy to defend doctrine, later heirs often denounced “philosophizing” as a betrayal of faith. This tension was less about reason itself than about fear: fear of rationalism after the Enlightenment, fear of heterodoxy after Pietism, and fear of losing certainty amid the speculative systems that surrounded them.

I am certain of the clarity and sufficiency of God’s word. That truth stands without my defense. As a thinking person, moreover, I am also certain that I’ve grown by the sort of reflexive thinking that is continually sharpened by analytic, philosophical, reasoning. Lutheranism is great as a tradition of not getting in the way of the Word; Lutheran Christians however would be wise to no longer get in the way of Lutheranism while trying to defend it. Anxiety is not the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Fearfulness is an illegitimate mother of thought for those in Christ. Christians who live in fear have only to meditate on the Word, receive the Sacrament, and pray to be led out of their anxieties and into peace.