How can we, indeed, give a witness in the public square?

By Rev. Stephen C. Krueger

A response to the essay by Pastor Daniel Preus titled, “How Can We Give a Witness for Jesus Christ in the Public Square While Avoiding the Errors of Unionism and Syncretism?”

Introduction

Pastor Daniel Preus, First Vice-President of the synod, has contributed an essay to the synodical discourse titled, “How Can We Give a Witness for Jesus Christ in the Public Square While Avoiding the Errors of Unionism and Syncretism?”  Because Pastor Preus has the standing he does and since he has engaged the church with his views on this most important issue, it is right to extend to him the courtesy of a creative response from another point of view for the purpose of additional, collegial dialog among many voices in the synod.

Pastor Preus could not have picked a more timely issue.   Especially since the New Immigration Act of 1965 opened the floodgates for immigration of the world to the United States, we are daily being challenged with knowing how to enter the vastness of today’s public square where the world’s religions have stepped up to the table of our contemporary pluralism.  Diana Eck, professor of comparative religious studies at Harvard, quips that when she first began her study of the world religions, she had to travel the world to encounter its many faiths.  Now, Eck says, if one wants to study the world’s religions, all one need do is walk up the block in any urban center in the US.

I have long enjoyed PBS’ Garrison Keillor and his tales of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, a mythical town of his rural imagination, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.”  The wonderful Lake Wobegon tales tell of an innocent life in rural Minnesota where, despite life’s complexities and ambiguities, people genuinely care for one another and find ways to insulate themselves from the temptations of contemporary life.  The town has three religious communities.  Pastor Ingqvist and his wife, Judy, serve Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church.  Father Emil holds down Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Catholic Church.  Then, there are “The Brethren” [an unusual free church, to say the least].

Each group criticizes the other in Lake Wobegon, but they find ways to live with each other [and love one another], too.  When Pastor Ingqvist tangles with his church council over the cost it will take to fix the furnace at the parsonage while Judy hopes to take a much needed vacation to the pastors’ rural conference in Florida, Father Emil shows up one evening with a bottle of brandy.  It seems to be about as ecumenical as the community ever gets but the caring is unmistakable.

Lake Wobegon is a fiction of the innocent imagination beloved by many who chuckle at Keillor’s many tales of a life which may have once been.  The trouble is that some in the synod seem to live in that world as if it were reality and not a fond hope of an era long-gone and never to return.

I was a delegate to the last synodical convention.  It was curious to me that when we were being introduced to the new electronic system through which votes would be taken, we had to answer some test questions, just to acquaint the delegates to this instantaneous technology.  One of the questions we were asked was to identify our home demographics.  Were we representing urban areas, suburban areas, or areas?  Almost half the delegates responded that they were from rural America.

The curiosity becomes more intense when one realizes that over 90% of the  population of North America is urban, with its many multi-cultural and pluralistic issues.  One must ask, “Are we of the LCMS even on the same page as the larger urban culture?”

I was struck by the question as I read Pastor Preus’ essay on giving a witness to Christ in today’s public square.  Does it even pass the test of relevancy?  Does the world Pastor Preus sets up and describes even remotely connect with the best thinking our church must produce in order to witness in today’s world as God has given it to us?

1.

There is no question that Pastor Preus means well.  He states, “For Christians it goes without saying that we are going to talk about Jesus to those who do not know Him, and for that matter, also to those who do.”   I commend him for urging his audience that when opportunities to witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ come our way, “we should be grateful and take advantage of them.”

Yet it is hard to imagine, given the parameters Preus lays down in his essay, just where one can do one’s witnessing in what Pastor Preus correctly describes as a “severely complicated life for us Christians” today.  Indeed, this postmodern world is complicated.  Would that his essay better appreciated these complications in which Christ’s Church must daily function as it seeks to give a faithful witness to the gospel amidst the vast pluralism of today’s setting.

Although Pastor Preus does not allude to the now widely discussed Yankee Stadium prayer  following the events of 9/11 by President David Benke, it obviously is the event under discussion.  Preus’ perspective, if I understand him correctly, is that to have participated in the event called by the Mayor of New York City in the wake of that national tragedy, was improper because it was idolatrous.  Preus, in the second part of his essay, cites examples from the Old Testament which show God’s disapproval when Israel follows false gods, rather than keeping the covenant God had cut with His people - that God alone will be Israel’s God and no other.  Pastor Preus then equates Israel’s syncretism, that is, the mixing of true faith with false faith, with what happens when a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor shows up at a time of a national emergency with others from other faiths as a nation tries to make sense out of an horrific tragedy.

One wonders, however, if this is like comparing apples and oranges.  Pastor Preus cites an extended reading from the Prophet Jeremiah, who was the Lord’s prophet to Israel at the time of the Babylonian exile.  In the historical setting, Israel was tempted to rely on the false gods of her neighbors in order to stave off the impending invasion by Babylon.  The temptation further extended to relying on political alliances, chiefly with the Pharaoh of Egypt, rather than coming before the Lord in repentance and with the true faith of that repentance.

One needs to ask, does 9/11 or the fictional scenario Pastor Preus invents in his essay [Western California, God forbid, slipping off into the Pacific] even remotely parallel the setting at issue with Jeremiah the Lord’s prophet? That is the problem here and throughout the essay.  The world in which Pastor Preus apparently lives doesn’t even mildly replicate the world most of us share today.

2.

The Lutheran faith tradition can do far better than Pastor Preus has done.  One of the key strengths of our history has been the historic distinction between law and gospel and how this distinction translates God’s works in God’s world through the Two Kingdoms. The Two Kingdoms is a distinction Luther taught and is especially helpful when it is properly understood.

The problem with Pastor Preus’ essay is that he drops the ball.  While appealing to the Two Kingdoms doctrine, as well he should, he reveals at essence and core, he does not understand it.  One hesitates to call down First Vice-Presidents of synod, [especially one who is a classmate] but it is painfully obvious in his conclusions that Preus doesn’t understand Two Kingdoms theology.

Here is the crux of it all.

Pastor Preus thinks that, “Thus, although the two kingdoms are quite distinct from each other, totally different in their functions and objectives, they frequently overlap.”

That’s not what Luther says.

Luther understood that the Two Kingdoms distinction was about God’s two-handed governance of God’s world.  On the left, God governed God’s first creation with God’s law.  All persons are subject to God’s law, Christian or not.  The law of God relates to the identity all persons have as children of Adam.  A read of Romans 1:  18-3:  20 is St. Paul’s apt description of life under the law of God.  God’s law is written into everybody’s life and heart, both in its revealed form and in its inherent-in-creation form.  No one can escape it.  Thus [we’ve always said] every world religion reflects something of the natural knowledge of God.  That knowledge is not salvific.  Yet, it knows something of life’s Creator and reflects that knowledge through laws, through the pursuit of justice and rights, and through according each of creation dignity.

It is this essential point that Preus misses in its entirety.  Christians, who live their lives in both kingdoms of God, at the same time, are obligated to be part of God’s left-hand kingdom work of justly loving and supporting God’s creation until God sends His Son again at the Last Day.

At the time of Luther, Enthusiasts claimed God was not interested in God’s fallen, but yet-still-loved first creation, and believed Christians could not involve themselves in a fallen and sinful world. Article 16 of the Augsburg Confession confesses just the opposite. Lutherans serve in the military and its chaplaincy involve themselves in the structures and orders of the world, and see their work as godly and good and right. Yet [and here’s the ambiguity], as Melanchthon writes over and over in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession [especially in Articles 4 and 12], “the law always accuses.”

The Christian also lives in God’s right hand governance, according to the gospel.  There, through the gospel, God creates a whole new you and me, after the likeness of Christ.  It is this new creation that God sets on fire to tell about the new life of forgiveness, restoration, peace and eternal life that is our witness to who Jesus Christ is and why Christ came.

Christians, according to Lutheran doctrine, live in both kingdoms, fully, and at the same time.

It was important to Martin Luther never to confuse the ethos under the law with the ethos under the gospel.  The two must remain separate even though both are fully real.

Yet, Preus writes, “Thus, although the two kingdoms are quite distinct from each other, totally different in their functions and objectives, they frequently overlap.”

On the basis of this fundamental misunderstanding of the Lutheran Two Kingdoms Distinction, Preus is nervous about “syncretism” at every turn in which the confessing Christian does his/her confessing in a confusing and complex world.

Luther, however, maintains, “that the two authorities [the kingdoms on the left and the right] or realms, the temporal and the spiritual, are kept distinct and separate from each other and that each is specifically instructed and restricted to its own task” [LW 46, 166].

And again, “Constantly I must pound in and squeeze in and drive in and wedge in this difference between the two kingdoms, even though it is written and said so often that it becomes tedious.  The devil never stops cooking and brewing these two kingdoms into each other” [LW 13, 194].

It is clear what Pastor Preus’ fundamental problem is from his perspective.  Essentially, because he cannot see any other way to function in God’s world without the two kingdoms overlapping, he in effect, cannot see how confessing Christians can do their confessing in an ambiguous and pluralistic world.

Good thing that the Church of Pentecost, to say nothing of St. Paul, was not so bound as they used every venue God gave them to witness to Jesus Christ amidst the structures of this old, fallen, but yet-still-loved-by-God’s world.  The gospel wouldn’t have ever gotten proclaimed, as it was, say, by Paul, in the Areopagus at Athens [see Acts 17:  16-34…one wonders how St. Paul would have measured up to the Preus critique].

3.

One of the essential things Luther’s Two Kingdoms distinction is meant to show is that God is God.  One of the great Luther scholars of mid-twentieth century was Paul Althaus.  His major theme of The Theology of Martin Luther was “Letting God be God.”  That was Luther.  Pastor Preus may not think that God can show up on the occasion of a national tragedy, but God may think otherwise.  That’s the whole point to the Two Kingdoms doctrine of our Lutheran theology.  God can show up in God’s world.

Before every member of the LCMS comes this question.  Forget the silly scenario which Preus presents about the west coast falling into the sea, here’s the real question.  In the wake of 9/11, was God there?  And I don’t mean any false god but the true God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Did God grieve?  Was not His only-begotten Son lifted high up on a cross, bearing up the pain and speechless horror of that event?  Was not God’s Holy Spirit present in prayer to the Tower of Strength?

IF GOD SHOWS UP FOR THESE EVENTS IN OUR LIVES [the point of the Two Kingdoms Doctrine from Luther], OUGHT WE NOT SHOW UP, TOO?  TO NAME THE NAME BY WHICH ALL OF HUMANKIND IS SAVED?  WHAT ELSE DOES IT MEAN TO WITNESS TO THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST IN TODAY’S WORLD?

4.

Pastor Preus’ complains that we are living in a postmodern world in which people do not generally believe in absolute truth anymore. Our world is no different than St. Paul’s.  Or Jesus’.  Or any of the others who came before us in the faith. Preus offers us no new ideas except to circle the wagons and defend a faith that so many, wrongly, perceive as increasingly irrelevant.

I beg to differ.  Using our best Lutheran, confessional resources, we have so much to offer to confessing Christ to our modern time.  Using our Lutheran Two Kingdoms doctrine, I am able to ask people to notice hundreds of really important things.  So, you say there are not ultimate truths to believe in?  Try justice.  Try rights.  And connect the dots in your witness.  It isn’t a big step to move from justice to justification, and that, by faith in Christ alone, and it isn’t a huge jump to move from rights to the Biblical notion of righteousness [which is ours by faith in Christ alone].

We can, indeed, give a witness, and a faithful one at that, in the public square.  You want to know why?  Because God’s there.  We need to be there too.  You’ll find God shaped, as God always is, in the form of a cross to love, redeem, heal and save.