Gottesblog

In wartime, there are always casualties and losses. So it is in the church militant. The Rev. Dr. Peter Scaer offers sobering comments on the sinking of the Australia. Lord, have mercy.

The LCMS is a conservative church body in a conservative confession, grounded in the inerrant Scriptures according to a quia subscription to the Book of Concord. We privilege our fathers in the faith, and look askance at innovation. This is not to say that we never change things, but we are reformers, not revolutionaries.

Worship is the essence of the catholic faith, and we cannot be saved unless we confess it. Our worship is directed solely to the Holy Trinity who is also the Holy Unity. Worship and confession cannot be separated. And indeed, “whoever does not believe” the catholic faith “faithfully and firmly cannot be saved.”

If we don’t “ordain” women because God’s Word forbids us, then we can safely conclude that Satan is driving us toward the practice as a subversion of our biblical confession. And why would he not? We’ve seen church body after church body fall into this practice - followed up swiftly by embracing homosexuality and other sexual deviancies.

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.