The point of having a synod is that we “walk together.” We all confess the Bible and the Lutheran confessions. But this confession is more than a cerebral and intellectual acceptance of propositional truths. To be a synod requires unity of practice that binds us together. So in addition to the Bible and the Confessions, we have other agreed-upon conditions for being in the LCMS.

Here is a Lutheran setting of the Divine Service in Gregorian form, “authorized by the Commission on Worship.”

In the previous part of our series, we saw how political and economic pressures brought a decisive end to the traditional understanding of usury championed by Luther. The Andreae-Gerhard position prevailed throughout the seventeenth century, thereby establishing a way for interest to be regarded, under certain conditions, as morally licit for Christians. As the distinction between the Zinskauf trade and ordinary lending gradually collapsed, the charging of interest on loans of every kind soon became widely accepted, provided, at least in theory, that the poor were still protected from economic harm.