The more Peter Leithart writes, the more he sounds like a Lutheran. And then he doesn’t. Either way, I can’t get enough of it. The vigor of us confessional Lutherans occasionally has the unfortunate side effect of making everything we tell you about doctrine sound like we’re holding a rod above your heads of all our fellow Christians. Or an axe.
But Leithart. He has the tone of someone who’s diving into scripture feet first. And acknowledging that it’s really, really messy. Scripture’s darker passages, winding stories, and odd comments just don’t wrap up nicely–it’s encouraging to hear someone admit that. And admit that without immediately claiming to have figured it out.
And this isn’t to say that Leithart’s opponents and critics aren’t diving into the pool just as deeply. Plenty of them are, and that’s why they’ve been so impassioned in their critique. As painful as this can be, it is the way of the church. What else do we mean when each Sunday we confess “one holy, catholic, and apostolic church?”
One church from Peter and Paul all the way up until the 34th PCA General Assembly 2007. One church that has trouble building consensus, trouble talking, trouble being polite, trouble even getting an informal show of hands. There’s a reason Jesus didn’t run for election. Jesus is not a member of your congregation. You are a member of His. And although it might surprise some to hear an LCMS Lutheran say it, when we each come to eat and drink, we’re not served with our own personal Jesus, a la (depeche) mod. “Given and shed for you” was not the precedent for “Have it your way.”
Scripture has this way of knocking the wind out of you, kicking your doors clean off their hinges, and sticking around in your craw long after you’ve asked it to take a hike. And just wait until it starts rifling through your desk drawers. Leithart sounds like a guy who’s watching Scripture rearrange his furniture. And knock a hole in the living room wall with the sofa. For the sake of the church. I like that.
Speaking of Scripture doing this to you—knocking the wind out of you (or in this case, me, yesterday):
Just a couple of chapters after the nice little “love chapter” (1 Cor 13), Paul ties his neat little Corinthian pep talk up with a cute little hand-written P.S. to the saints in that locale:
“If you don’t love the Lord Jesus, you can go to hell.”
Something tells me that few ministers preaching wedding sermons append this P.S. to the end of the “love chapter” reading as an epexegetical help.
Glad you’re being encouraged to go under the knife.