Hermann Sasse, a liturgical theologian even as he arranged for the inscription on his tombstone

Given the major role Hermann Sasse has played in my spiritual and scholarly life over the past five decades, informed Gottesblog readers will have no difficulty imagining my emotions as on the afternoon of the Last Sunday of the Church Year orthodox Australian Lutheran layman the retired physician Dr Ian Hamer drove a few of us to the Adelaide cemetery where this patriarch of 20th-century world Lutheranism was laid to rest on his falling asleep in 1976. Every few years since being awarded my Ph.D. in 1983 and organizing the St Catharines international symposium marking the centennial of Sasse’s birth in 1995, the thought has randomly crossed my mind that this leading figure on the theological faculties of Erlangen and Adelaide could now move to the back burner of my academic oven so that I might concentrate on other writers and topics more relevant to the concerns of the present. And then, invariably, I would receive a prodding or an invitation to engage once more in a bout of Sasse research, which would result in renewed awareness of the timeliness of Sasse’s testimony to our present situation.

During a visit of a little more than two weeks from 18 November through 4 December of this year I fell totally under the spell of Australia’s enchanting beauty, being captured not least by the charm of the nineteenth-century city of Adelaide (named after the Queen of the sailor King William IV), which was colonized by immigrants of the ‘better sort’ who had made their fortunes in England but found their rise in society held back by their commitment to Nonconformist Christianity. The city center located on undulating terrain with the beautiful Adelaide hills on the horizon was designed by the British army officer Colonel Light whose military role was enhanced by his skills as a surveyor. Adelaide gives the impression of an idyllic English city of a few generations ago that just happens to be located on the Mediterranean.

Sasse’s tombstone records the prior passing of his wife Charlotte Margarete née Naumann (b. 1898) whose death in 1964 left Hermann a lonely widower for more than a decade as he lived among a small Lutheran community many of whose members did not appreciate his confessional theology in an Adelaide at that time reserved towards all things German notwithstanding Dr Sasse’s noble history of resistance to the ideological tyranny of the Third Reich.

Faith Hamer kindly supplied me with a bunch of flowers to lay on the grave of my father in the faith, her warning that the strongly scented blooms might provoke an attack of hay fever being starkly fulfilled. Finland’s Bishop Juhana Pohjola, my fellow guest speaker at a series of conferences held in multiple locations under the auspices of Creative Word Fellowship, one of two organizations gathering together the orthodox remnant in the Lutheran Church of Australia, and I shall treasure the photograph taken of us standing at the two sides of Sasse’s tombstone.

 I have always fallen under conviction when rereading or remembering Sasse’s biting comment that no greater reproach can be levelled at a theologian than the founded claim that he is ignorant of liturgy. Mea culpa, I have much to learn. At the end of his life, as he was writing some of the materials gathered in the posthumously issued collection Corpus Christi, Sasse lamented Paul VI’s unilateral demolition of the historic Order of the Mass infelicitously described as Tridentine. Notwithstanding his decades-long critique of aspects of Roman eucharistic theology, the aged Sasse described this rite as the most beautiful in Christendom. It came as no surprise, then, to discover that the inscription at the bottom of the headstone erected to mark the burial place of Hermann and Charlotte is taken straight from the Proper Preface of the historic Requiem Mass: Tuis fidelibus, Domine, vita mutatur non tollitur—For Thy faithful ones, o Lord, life is changed not taken away.

Alas, Sasse’s powerful theological legacy has fallen into oblivion and even under derision for a majority of pastors and laity in the Lutheran Church of Australia whose two parent synods he did so much to steer towards union in the mid 1960s. The same fate has to a great extent befallen the contribution of Sasse’s foremost student John Kleinig. As of now the (unconstitutional!) introduction of women’s ordination into the LCA within a year or so appears humanly speaking unstoppable. Against this background the leaderships of both LCMS and LCC are resolved to give the utmost backing to the courageous orthodox minority in Australian Lutheranism that is slowly and painfully realizing that a traumatic ecclesial parting of the ways may now be in the offing. So it was that Bishop Pohjola and I accepted the invitation of the Creative Word Fellowship to deliver lectures in a series of locations in South Australia, Victoria, and Queensland on various aspects of the issue of Women’s Ordination. At the end of our trip we gave presentations and on the next day attended the Eucharist at a church in Toowoomba Qld that had been founded by Kurt Marquart; I was deeply moved to speak within feet of an altar where Kurt had officiated. Viewing the stunning landscape of Toowomba on an all too brief visit helped me understand Kurt’s reluctance to relocate to Springfield IL back in the early 1970s and to appreciate why he always maintained that he had left a piece of his heart in that sun-baked part of the world.

Our brief visit to Sasse’s graveside concluded with a brief devotion in which we gave thanks for Hermann’s witness and prayed that it might be reclaimed now almost fifty years after his death. One of the brightest features of our time in Australia was to encounter and start forging friendships with so many young people, including men sensing a vocation to the ministry, who are firmly and calmly on the orthodox side of the aisle despite the monkey wrench that loyalty to scripturally bound conscience looks set to throw into their ‘career prospects’ in LCA. As we conclude the Advent season and are about to enter into the holy twelve days of Christmas, it would be meet and fitting for us to pray both publicly and privately for the courageous men and women of the Australian Lutheran remnant, anticipating and hoping that in the months and years ahead we may be given to throw appropriate forms of practical help in their direction also. As Kurt Marquart once said in another context, Communio una est—if one member of the body suffers, all do.