Is it important to uphold true doctrine?

Hermann Sasse was an important Lutheran theologian in the twentieth century.  In his later life he taught many pastors in Australia and was a key figure in the formation of the Lutheran Church of Australia.   

In Here We Stand: Nature and Character of the Lutheran Faith, Sasse meditated on 1 John 4:1-6 as follows:  

The Apostle of Love warns Christians: ‘Believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone into the world.’  Although John’s Gospel and Epistles constantly set forth the love of one’s fellow believers as the criterion for true faith and genuine Christianity, his criterion for erroneous faith and heresy is a dogmatic statement: ‘Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus is come in the flesh, is not of God and this is the spirit of the Antichrist.’  In other words, contrary to all expectation, the correct teaching of the Incarnation appears as the touchstone according to which true doctrine is distinguished from false, the church from heresy. It was so at the beginning of the church’s history; it shall continue to be so until the light of eternal truth shall enlighten us all.  Of those times in which the life of the church was not very much disturbed by concern for pure teaching and by alarm concerning false teaching, it may be said they do not belong to the great ages of the church.  On the contrary, the church is always in danger of dying when it ceases to wrestle for truth and to pray that the Lord may guard it against the devil’s wiles and false teaching. 1 

The great ages of the church include times such as when the Nicene Creed was agreed to and the Reformation. These were times when there was alarm concerning false teaching and there was a concern for pure teaching. They were also times when church people gave differing answers to fundamental questions. Consider the very beginnings of the church:  

The question of who Jesus is has been with Christians from the beginning.  According to Mark’s Gospel (8:27-30) it stretches back to Jesus’ question to the disciples on the road to Caesarea Philippi.  Fights over this question also stretch back to the earliest church, so that in 1 John 4:2-3 we read, ‘By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God’. 2     

Wengert continues:  

Even the greatest monument to common Christian confession, the Nicene Creed, was born in controversy and did not finally resolve the question.  In part this is because the question stretches the very limits of human language and thought, as we gaze on the mystery of the Word become flesh.  In part this question – ‘but who do you say that I am?’ – dare not go away.  It is the heart of the Christian faith, extending from Peter on the road (‘You are the Messiah!’) to the centurion at the cross (‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’} to us.  As the French church historian Charles Kannengiesser once remarked, the church is not fully alive unless being forced to confess (and debate) Christology, the nature of Christ’s person. 3 

The sixteenth century was a time in church history when there was alarm about false teaching and concern for pure teaching. The reformers sought to correct abuses in practice and teaching, and be faithful to Scripture. This led to disputes and excommunications. It also led – for instance in the Augsburg Confession of 1530 – to the confession of fundamental Christian truths. Fifty years later it led to the Formula of Concord, and the Book of Concord (the Lutheran Confessions), through which Lutherans agreed on what they taught, believed and confessed.        

The Lutheran confessions were forged in, and by, bitter struggles against false teaching and practices – for instance the appropriate way to repent and receive forgiveness of sins.  It wasn’t doctrine for doctrine’s sake; it was doctrine for salvation’s sake.  This affects how we view and use the Lutheran confessions. Timothy Wengert outlines how to, and how not to, use the Lutheran confessions.  

History is the process of discovering from the record of humans of the past just how different our world is from theirs. Yet in confessional documents such as the Formula of Concord, the more seriously we take the vast differences between these sixteenth century confessors of the faith and us, the greater the possibility that the echoes of their confessions may speak to us today. 4  

He goes on to note:  

Sometimes people have used Christian confessions in such a way as to gloss over or ignore these differences.  Then such testimonies of faith become little more than laws, under which the recipients must bend or else. Or they become fonts of proof texts used to uphold the readers’ most cherished theological opinions. Either way the vibrancy of confessing the faith under adversity lies undetected under the debris of history, and we greatly impair the documents’ ability to function as testimonies to our Lord and his gospel. 5      

The Lutheran confessions shouldn’t lead to a ‘dead faith’ involving only academic disputation and acceptance. They should – as they did in the sixteenth century – lead to faith active in love.  

 Mervyn Wagner, 2024 

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1. cited in For All The Saints, ALPB, IV, p40
2. Timothy J. Wengert, A Formula for Parish Practice, Eerdmans, 2006, p 138
3. ibid., p 138
4. Wengert, op.cit. p 18
5. Wengert, op.cit. p 18