Gottesblog

We in the LCMS - and other conservative church bodies - insist on the traditional practice of male-only ordination.

There are three explanations for this, moving from right, to moderate, to left:

The Gottesdienst, the Divine Service, the Mass as we practice it in our Evangelical Catholic post-Reformation liturgy in our Lutheran tradition, is a balance between both Word and Sacrament. Our LSB hymnal presents it as such: the Service of the Word (pages 186-193) and the Service of the Sacrament (pages 194-202).

The conventional wisdom is that Jesus mainly spoke Aramaic, and that the New Testament was only written in Greek in order for the Gospel’s spread among the Gentiles. In his 2015 book, Did Jesus Speak Greek?: The Emerging Evidence of Greek Dominance in First-Century Palestine, author Dr. G. Scott Gleaves explains how he began to question this “Aramaic Hypothesis” that Aramaic was the “dominant language” in first century Palestine.

And we’re not talking about a little grant here or there to upgrade security or help rebuild a roof after a storm. We are talking about millions of dollars in tax money running the organization. LSI isn’t a little milk-and-cookie outfit that supplies VBS materials to churches. It boasts “more than 500 employees and an operating budget of $32 million.”

When people really, really want something that violates Scripture or the Confessions, they become desperate to gainsay the passages that they don’t want to submit to. They find clever ways to work around them.

In the past, the assumption was that young people wanted something new, something that rejected the old, something that broke away from history and heritage and formality. But today’s youth culture is different.

You may have heard about the alarming findings regarding the LCMS by the most recent Pew Religious Landscape Study.