ViaCrucis
Confessional Lutheran
- Oct 2, 2011
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Hello CryptoLutheran, first, I loved your post on denominations at the beginning of this thread. You did a fantastic job of summarizing the history of the growth and fragmentation of the Church at large.
That being said, I respectfully disagree with your assertion that our "view of Christianity is shaped by ideas of other men". In some ways there is some truth to this statement, but I think this is oversimplified. We all turn to someone more advanced as Christians to help us figure out how to make faith work in real life, but some of us, myself in particular, do not seek out a single denominational source for teaching. It has been my experience that if a Christian is reading the Bible for oneself, when we listen to someone teach, we will know how accurate the teacher is. If you know your Bible, that frees a person from depending on one source and opens avenues to seek specific answers to specific questions, something I personally have found very beneficial.
I would never suggest anyone rely on any single individual. Though I am myself a Lutheran (I wasn't always, I became Lutheran later in life) I find a great deal of help from people from many different traditions.
What I meant is that nobody comes to the Bible as a blank slate; we all approach the Bible with ideas, assumptions, presumptions, prejudices, and biases which may or may not have been shaped by our faith communities. Some people, without much experience in the Church, may approach the Bible based on a very fragmentary set of ideas that they heard growing up, either from Christians, non-Christians, and perhaps having their own assumptions and filters through which they heard those things.
It's not that we must look to a human person as some kind of guru; it's that we all are products of our environment and perceptions; we all have our own experiences, and we all come from different backgrounds. So even someone who has zero knowledge about Christianity will still come to the Bible with their own experiences.
That also means that one of the responsibilities of the Church is to help guide and inform--to teach. It's not about having a "teacher", I think it's dangerous to rely on a single individual. But there is instead a collective work of teaching, pastors, teachers, scholars, theologians, biblical exegetes, etc; and all of those different voices serve a benefit in teaching and helping to shape us as we grow in our faith and knowledge of Scripture.
I do, admittedly, consider Lutheran sources generally more highly than non-Lutheran ones. That is a bias I have, but it is in part an intentional bias. There are reasons why I'm Lutheran rather than Baptist or Catholic. It has nothing to do with brand, or tribal affiliation. Instead it is the product of a conviction that what I have found within this historic expression of the Christian faith, called "Lutheranism", is the most biblically faithful, the most theologically true, and that it is historically grounded.
When I call myself a Lutheran I'm not saying "I belong to Martin Luther", or "I follow Martin Luther". I'm saying that this particular confession of Christian faith has convinced me to be the most true--biblically, theologically, doctrinally. I am also admitting to myself that it shouldn't be up to me to re-invent the wheel. I believe there is a faithful, historic, confessional way of being a Christian that already exists, my personal responsibility, therefore, is to conform myself to what is biblically and historically Christian--to "contend for the faith once and for all delivered to the saints" as Jude says in his epistle.
We all do that, or something like that. Whether we are part of a globe-spanning communion of over a billion people (e.g. the Roman Catholic Church), or part of a small Baptist community in Small Town America. Or that non-denominational church that still has teaching and practice that it has inherited from what came before it (usually a combination of Baptist and Charismatic traditions).
It would, therefore, be dishonest to say we don't. We all learn the faith, grow in it, by hearing and reading and practicing. That's unavoidable.
-CryptoLutheran
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