BISHOP VOIGT'S CHRISTMAS GREETING of 2025: a pastoral word of truth to a tragically divided church

Videobotschaft von Bischof Hans-Jörg Voigt zum Weihnachtsfest 2025 - YouTube

During my last decade of fulltime service at the St Catharines seminary, especially in the context of the dialogue then taking place between our ILC and the PCPCU, I came to know and to cherish the friendship of the longest-serving Bishop of our German sister Church the SELK, the Rt Revd Hans-Joerg Voigt, D.D.

Of course, those talks, whose last session was held in 2019 and which were preceded by informal conversations between the faculty of the Theologische Hochschule in Oberursel and the staff of the Johann-Adam-Moehler Institut in Paderborn, did not aim to lay a fast track to the re-establishment of eucharistic fellowship between Concordia Lutherans and the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, they were intended, at least in the mind of the theological leader of the Lutheran side of the table, to demonstrate how, despite an estrangement lasting now for a period of half a millennium, we were still ecclesial ‘family’. ‘Gemeinsamkeiten herausstellen!’ was the imperative delivered to me by the SELK’s senior theologian, Prof Dr Werner Klaen, another good friend from those days, whose guest semester at CLTS was cut short by the outbreak of covid: ‘Demonstrate what we have in common.’ The Final Report is misunderstood if not read from this perspective. Estranged families do not come together and heal from long disputes and rows all that swiftly. Festina lente might be a good motto in such circumstances.

My first visit to Oberursel, in the fall of 2015, on which my wife accompanied me as we spent a few days extra on a memorable pilgrimage to Neuendettelsau, was somewhat tense, since I had a less than positive reputation among at least some of the faculty of the Theologische Hochschule in light of a blistering review I had published in Logia of Volker Stolle’s Paulus und Luther, which had caused a big brouhaha in the SELK. Stolle, who maintains that Paul wrote only a portion of the epistolary corpus attributed to him, maintained inter alia that the Law-Gospel distinction is alien to the content of the biblical writings.I recall an uneasy conversation in Erfurt in the spring of 2004 with the then Bishop of the SELK, Dr Diethard Roth, about the review in question. ‘Herr Professor, you said …Yes, Herr Bischof, I did …awkward silence.’ In the intervening period, I have intermittently wondered whether the review was indecently polemical; the jury is still out and opinion divided, I suppose.

Professor Stolle may still remain an explosive figure in the SELK. Back in 2021 Werner Klaen edited a festschrift—but shouldn’t it have been a Denkschrift?—marking the 125th anniversary of the birth of Hermann Sasse, whose grave in Adelaide I visited with much emotion two years ago. As Tom Winger and I each contributed an essay to this volume, the long retired Professor Stolle submitted two, raising eyebrows and igniting no small fury as he attacked Sasse’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper as unscriptural and criticised Sasse for turning away from the higher critical method in which he had been trained at the university of Berlin. Bultmann remains one of the household gods for those trained by the theological faculties of the German universities.

The most divisive issue facing the SELK over the past generation has been the ordination of women, a practice explicitly disallowed in the constitution of 1969 that brought together a number of still separated Churches that for a variety of reasons had split from their local Landeskirchen largely as a result of their opposition to the Prussian Union and its consequences. Professor Stolle has not been the only teacher at the Hochschule to advocate the ordination of women, which means that it’s fine and dandy to maintain that those silly old writers of Sacred Scripture were out to lunch.

While not knowing all the details of the brewing controversy, I believe I can truthfully report that the issue came at last to the boil in the fall of this year. According to SELK custom, a General Pastoral Conference (Allgemeines Pfarrkonvent) was held ahead of a Synod of the whole Church; each was the fifteenth in a series of such gatherings that go back to the foundation of the SELK. I believe that at both assemblies the advocates of WO remained in a minority, but they were by now chafing angrily at the bit and proposing that, while the SELK should remain one Church, it must now formally allow for two different practices on this matter. Look where that position has got the Lutheran Church of Australia to over the last several years! Since the recent introduction of WO there is clearly only one official position Down Under, the victors grudgingly allowing some holdout pastors to be grandfathered unto retirement. But the Australian tragedy is another story and in the Providence of God the apostates who have hijacked the old LCA may not be granted the last word.

At all events and to cut a long story short, the Allgemeines Pfarrkonvent resolved by majority that one Church cannot have two practices on such a sensitive matter as WO. Likewise by majority vote it was resolved that the two sides would respect each other in the meantime as two Commissions would be set up, one aiming at the preservation of unity (Einheitskommission), the other looking more realistically at the sad prospect of separation (Trennungskommission). With around forty thousand members, the SELK is already a tiny church body, whose orthodox component will emerge as a still tinier Church in the event of Trennung. If I have got my facts right, the Synod accepted the proposals of the Pastoral Conference. Had I been present with right of franchise at the Pfarrkonvent, I would have disappointed the good and ever courteous Bishop by voting against the motion that would have me respect the proponents of WO; no, I pity them in their malicious apostasy and could therefore not commune with them if they persist in their church-destroying error. Perhaps my review of Stolle’s literary bombshell hit the target.

In this delightful video, delivered in clear, slow Hoch Deutsch that might bear traces of the Bishop’s East German origins, those open to a refresher in spoken German may treat themselves to a beautifully thought-through and meticulously articulated devotional address that lays bare the SELK’s current state of woe while calmly pointing to its God-pleasing solution. Taking as his starting point and lodestar our Lord’s Isiaiahnically prophesied role as Wonderful Counsellor, the Bishop acknowledges that the SELK is walking in darkness as its internal divisions keep it from beaming Christ’s Light outside its own narrow bounds. Making no effort to minimise the crisis situation brought about through the dissensions that are ripping his Church apart, the Bishop points out that while one side is perplexed over the dismissal of clear Scriptures long understood according to the unanimous consent of Christendom, the other cannot understand why today’s secular consensus on the equal rights of man and woman does not immediately issue in the opening up of pastoral ordination to women. The only way he sees out of the SELK’s impasse is for the Church to ‘orient’ herself to the Wonderful Counsel of the Child in the Manger. In this context he refers to the understanding of ‘orientation’ propounded by the devout Roman Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann, a friend of the late Pope Benedict XVI who died in 2018. Spaemann found deep meaning in the literal meaning of ‘orientation’ as a turning to the East, which involves a fastening of attention on Bethlehem and Jerusalem, an attitude that has much to do with the highly meaningful age-old eastward orientation of church buildings and especially of the altar and its focal point, the Crucifix. Dot the i’s and connect the t’s and it becomes clear that the Bishop is beseeching all laity and clergy under his care to turn from the secular consensus of our age back to the wholesome reality of Church and Ministry as put in place by our Wonderful Counsellor and attested in all the Sacred Scriptures and in the uninterrupted orthodox Tradition of His Church. It would be a terrible mistake, as I have heard from the lips of at least two senior clergymen occupying positions of influence north and south of the border, to maintain that only the exegesis of two Pauline texts stands in the way of WO; no, tota scriptura forbids this malpractice!

Towards the end of his address, the Bishop surprised and delighted me by indicating that Germany also has lately been witnessing evidence of the ‘quiet revival’ that has been noted in England and France, a phenomenon marked by young people’s showing unexpected interest in traditional forms of Christianity, turning to the clergy for instruction, baptism, and pastoral care in the process. SELK pastors too have been beneficiaries of this development, though the Bishop is wary of claiming that an actual Awakening or Erweckung is under way. Bishop Juhana Pohjola once told me that the Finnish General Prayer includes a petition for Revival. Call it Awakening or Revival according to your good pleasure, but as the Western world reels under jihad both Islamic and secular, such rejuvenation of the Church is the crying need of the hour, most direly felt in the countries of Western Europe and urgently called for in Canada where the Province of Quebec is now setting its Quiet Revolution of the 1960s in constitutional stone in a particularly militant form of the laïcité enacted in France as long ago as 1905. Sed contra dictum est: ‘How blest the land, the city blest, where Christ the ruler is confessed!’ (LSB #340, st. 3). And the United States could use some extra doses of such Awakening also.

Ich danke Dir fűr diesen Weihnachtsgruß, mein lieber deutscher Bischof!