The American Interim

The purpose of writing this blog is witness.  This is my effort to spur myself and others on to faithful witness in the Missouri Synod and to the people in our nation who have exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images.  So I want to write specifically about how we may do that and point out the areas where faithful witness in the Missouri Synod has been deficient.

I have pointed out some of these areas in passing in the first three posts.  But mostly they have been groundwork, reminding us that we are called to conquer the world, the flesh, and the devil by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our witness.  This post is also groundwork, pointing back to a specific instance of faithful witness in the early days of the Lutheran Church.

However, it’s necessary I address it now because the times demand it.  We are forty-six days away from the election.  Already we have had at least two attempts to assassinate former President Trump.  We ought to be giving thought to what our response may be in the event of another contested election and possible repressive measures taken by those in authority.  In reality, Covid already served notice on the Church that we should have already been clear in our minds what obedience to the government is demanded of the Church by Christ and what is not.  But if we are caught flat-footed again, we are without excuse.  And sadly, there has been no real reflection on our conduct during that last crisis.  If it had not been for one young pastor at the 2023 convention making a motion from the floor that the Synod repent of closing churches during the lockdown, all we would have heard from the synod about Covid is self-praise for the way we endured during those “difficult times.”

Forty-six days is a little longer than Lent.  This would be a good time for prayer and fasting for our Synod and nation.

Unfortunately, among confessional Lutherans in the LCMS there is little of this earnest repentance.  Instead, many of us are in the grip of akedia, sloth, a tendency to shrug our shoulders and say, “What can I do?”  As we will see, that was not the spirit of the confessors at Magdeburg, who were prepared to stand with Christ even if they were small in number and the noteworthy theologians of the Church were not on their side.  On the other hand, among confessional Lutherans in the Missouri Synod, one also finds a smug worldly wisdom that looks down its nose at alarm about the political climate in the United States.  These voices maintain that the times in which we find ourselves are no different, or no worse, than the difficulties faced by the Church in any other time.  Concern about these things belongs to intellectual inferiors and evangelicals.

Confessio Magdeburgensis

During Covid, Pastor David Ramirez did a number of talks on the Magdeburg Confession of 1550.  Resistance to Tyrannical Government | vdma (bugenhagenconference.org)

Dr. Christian Preus also published two articles in the Luther Classical College magazine Christian Culture called “Lessons from Magdeburg” which were very helpful to me as I was sorting through these issues and teaching them to my congregation.  Lessons from Magdeburg, Part 1 - Christian Culture (lutherclassical.org)

https://www.cc.lutherclassical.org/fall-2021/lessons-from-magdeburg-part-2/%C2%A0

One can find a free text of the Magdeburg Confession here: Magdeburg-Confession-1550.pdf (gereformeerd.org)

Or buy a copy here: The Magdeburg Confession: 13th of April 1550 AD: Pastors of Magdeburg, Colvin PhD, Matthew, Grant, George, Trewhella, Matthew: 9781470087531: Amazon.com: Books

If you haven’t read it, you should do so right away.  You will be opening a door into an armory that has been forgotten by the Lutheran Church for decades or centuries.

A lot was written and spoken about the Magdeburg Confession during Coronatide because it was obviously directly applicable to the question of what the churches should do in the face of government interdiction of the Divine Service.  In it, the pastors at Magdeburg gave a theological justification for the city’s armed resistance against the Emperor when he demanded they submit to the Augsburg Interim, a program for the churches in Germany in which the Lutherans were given a few small concessions, but required to adopt ceremonies—adiaphora—that they had thrown out as being inconsistent with the Gospel.

For those who don’t know the history, this is the story.  After Luther’s death, Emperor Charles V invaded and conquered Saxony and the other German territories that had accepted the Reformation.  He imposed the Augsburg Interim, noted above, which allowed the Lutheran pastors to continue to be married and to distribute both the body and blood at the Lord’s Supper; Rome required priests to be unmarried and only allowed laypeople to receive the consecrated host.  It was called an “interim” because these concessions were only until the Pope’s council had definitively “settled” the questions raised by the Reformation.  Meanwhile, the Interim forced the Lutheran Churches to accept almost all the traditional ceremonies of the Roman Church, including those they had rejected as contrary to the Gospel, such as Corpus Christi processions.  It required the restoration of the seven Sacraments of the Roman Church and even defined the article of justification in a way contrary to Article IV of the Augsburg Confession, saying that a person was not justified solely by grace, through faith, for Christ’s sake, but also by love.

The leading theologians of the Church, particularly Philipp Melanchthon, rather than refusing to accept the Interim as faithful witnesses to Christ and suffering as a result, instead tried to moderate the Interim by creating one of their own.  They argued that it was permissible for Christians to give way on matters of adiaphora, since they are ceremonies neither commanded nor forbidden by God. 

To make an obvious comparison to our own time, many pastors argued that it was permissible, or even required, for churches to comply with various government edicts regarding the suspension of the Divine Service or the wearing of masks, since masks are neither commanded nor forbidden by God, and one may hear the Word of God online.

However, many pastors refused to go along with the Interim and as a result were either killed or driven from their cities.  Many of those who survived fled to a city in northern Germany called Magdeburg, where the city council had refused to accept the Interim.  As a result, they were attacked theologically by compromising church leaders in Wittenberg, and the town itself was ultimately besieged by the Emperor.  This was the setting in which the Magdeburgers wrote their Confession.  Thankfully, God granted grace to the Lutheran Church, enabled Magdeburg to withstand the siege, and caused the Elector of Saxony to defeat the Emperor, which led to religious tolerance being granted the Lutherans in 1552.

Those were the political spoils of this conflict.  The much greater theological spoils have been handed down to us in Article X of the Formula of Concord, in which the Lutheran Church confesses that although we are free in matters of ceremony and other things not commanded or forbidden by God, during a time of persecution the Church must not adopt ceremonies that make it appear as though we have communion with those who deny the Gospel in its purity.

The American Interim

Covid was a gift to us in that it made it apparent that we are living under a different interim today, but nevertheless a real one.  This interim is not written down anywhere or openly enforced with arms, like the Augsburg Interim was.  Nevertheless, its effects were apparent during Covid.  And, for those with eyes to see, its stipulations make themselves felt in many other areas of our life and teaching, where the Lutheran Church censors itself and does not permit the teachings of our fathers in the faith to be known, discussed, or publicly taught. 

I will call this interim under which we live “The American Interim.”  The first Interim demanded a variety of ecclesiastical concessions that Lutherans could not make in good conscience and was supported by theologians who wanted to avoid persecution.  It was an “interim” because it would require the submission of the Lutheran Church until such time as the Pope dropped the axe and destroyed the Lutheran Church utterly. 

The American Interim is only a little different.  Its unwritten stipulations require subservience on the part of the Lutheran Church (and any church that wants to adhere to the Scripture as the Word of God) to the ceremonies and doctrines of the American state religion until such time as the Church is swallowed up by apostasy and its children have all been converted.  Until that time, the Lutheran Church is allowed to preach whatever doctrine it sees fit within the increasingly narrow confines of its churches, but publicly it is required to be neutered and signal its submission to the tenets of American civic religion.  Even within the churches, both theologians and sitters in pews are likely to ostracize or condemn any vocal dissent from Americanism.

Many have used the terminology “post-war consensus” to try to describe the prescriptions of this interim.  It is difficult to precisely define what exactly the lines are in which the churches are supposed to color, because there is nothing in the way of a confession or catechism or a law that lays out the tenets of the American religion.  Instead of being this forthright, the American order maintains obedience through constant inculcation of its values via the statements of government officials, official history taught in public schools, and reinforcement through popular media.

But even though there is no decree of an emperor or a council explicitly requiring that the churches not step beyond certain lines in its teaching and practice, pastors and laypeople that approach those lines can sense their existence the same way a bull learns how close he can come to an electric fence without being shocked.

Magdeburg on the Purpose of Government

Probably the biggest discernible stipulation of the American Interim is the requirement that churches affirm religious pluralism.  The attention given to the Magdeburg Confession in the last four years is primarily due to its explication of the limits of Christian obedience to tyrannical government and its teaching regarding the duty of lesser magistrates to resist with the sword higher government officials who seek to destroy the Law of God and the pure teaching of the Gospel in the Church. 

But Magdeburg’s teaching regarding the purpose of government is probably the biggest affront to the American Interim, and the most significant example of the way the Lutheran Church has edited or forgotten the teaching of its fathers in order to escape the wrath of the American regime.  Just as Melanchthon sought peace with the emperor by developing a compromise Interim, so the Lutheran Church in America, wittingly or not, has tried to preserve what it considered the most important articles of Christian doctrine by forgetting, remaining silent about, or rejecting those teachings of the Lutheran Church of the past that would infuriate American sensibilities.  And probably the most important example of this is what Magdeburg says about government, even though it is only saying what all, or nearly all, orthodox Lutherans would have said on the topic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Magdeburg asserts that God has instituted both the power of the Church to forgive and retain sins and also the power of the government to uphold the Law of God, maintaining external obedience with physical force. 

And although He does not desire the powers to be mixed up with each other, nonetheless He desires them to help each other in turn, so that in the end they all may agree, and that everything in its own place and way principally may promote the true knowledge of God and His Glory and their eternal salvation, or, when it does not attain this ultimate goal, may at least bring about a secondary sort of well-being, that men may live peacefully, uprightly, (and not unfruitful) in this civil manner of life.   

To reiterate: God instituted both government and Church.  It is His will that the two kingdoms “help each other in turn, that they may agree.”  Further, the government has a responsibility also to aim at promoting the true knowledge of God, His glory, and eternal salvation.

In other words, according to Magdeburg, the government is responsible before God to uphold His Law.  It is not free to promote homosexual marriage, transgenderism, abortion, or demand that the United States be just as open to Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Norse paganism, or Satanism as it is to Christianity.  It is not that, as a matter of prudence, a government in a religiously diverse nation may not deal more leniently with worshippers of false gods than one in which Christianity is the religion of the state.  But it is also not the case that a ruler can have a clean conscience before God if he makes no effort to uphold God’s Law according to both table, and say, “Although I am a Christian and think homosexual marriage is forbidden by God, nevertheless as a servant of the United States government I am required to let each man do what is right in his own eyes.”

Magdeburg goes further:

Therefore polities and economies have been principally instituted, and are preserved and defended by God for the sake of the Church… The legitimately called magistrate, from the word of God, ought to defend pious and honest citizens or subjects, and especially the Church, against injuries by the wicked, which he ought to prevent by bodily force and the sword; and with the greatest care he ought to see to it that men be taught rightly about religion, and that they conduct themselves publicly and privately for true piety and honesty.

Much has been said and written, both by the muckraking, yellow media, and by those within the Church, against the specter of Christian Nationalism.  It’s hard to tell exactly what they mean by this.  The media has called the present Speaker of the House a “Christian Nationalist” because he opposes abortion.  Some within the Church appear to conflate Christian Nationalism with Nazism or Fascism. 

The writers of the Magdeburg Confession, together with Melanchthon and other orthodox Lutheran theologians who wrote similar things, were neither Nazis nor Fascists.  They did, however, correctly believe that the civil government is an ordinance of God put in place to uphold God’s Law.  As long as the Lutheran Church ties its hands in this matter and believes and teaches that the government is behaving as God’s representative when it praises those who cast aside God’s Law, we are not giving a faithful witness.  We are American Interimists, not American Martyrs.

Magdeburg on Resistance Against Tyrannical Government

Magdeburg also lays out four species of misrule by the civil authority and specifies what sort of resistance is incumbent on Christians in each case.

The first is when a ruler has personal sins or character flaws.  In this case Christians are to bear with the ruler and continue to show him honor.

In the second species, a ruler sins by depriving someone beneath him of his rights, his wife or property contrary to law.  In this case, Magdeburg counsels that Christians should not resist if they can refrain without sin.

In the third, a ruler makes a law requiring some violation of the law of God, which a “lesser magistrate”—one who is called by God to govern a smaller body of people—cannot obey without sin.  In this case local officials are bound before God not to comply, though they may not be required to resist with force of arms. 

In considering this third species of misrule, we can see that for decades the churches have failed to teach correctly.  The most glaring example of this is the legalization of abortion in the United States.  The churches should have been teaching their members in government that it was their duty to refuse to allow abortion clinics to operate under their jurisdiction.  What else were they doing but giving to Caesar what is God’s when they said, “God forbids murder, but the United States allows it”?  Instead, government officials should have refused to follow the wicked laws and endured whatever suffering came as a result of their obedience to God.  Had this happened, millions of lives would have probably been saved, and the United States would have been forced to face up to the slaughter it was committing.  And even if it had not, the Church would have given a faithful witness.

In the fourth species of misrule, a ruler does not merely seek to destroy the rights of individuals, but makes war on God, either His Law or His Church.  The Magdeburgers accused the Emperor (and his sycophants among the Lutheran Adiaphorists) of doing this by preventing the Church from teaching and worshipping according to the Gospel.

Under this species of misrule, a godly magistrate is required by God to use the sword to defend the people under his authority against the wicked ruler, whom the Magdeburg Confession calls a Beerwolf.  The Beerwolf, or “bear-wolf”, was a term used by Luther for the Pope in particular and antichrist tyrants in general, who like a wolf or bear seek to tear apart Christ’s sheep.

When the civil government seeks to destroy the Church or the law of God by force of arms, those called to government are required to resist it according to their calling—that is, with physical force.  It is the Church’s job to defend the flock of God with the spiritual sword of God’s Word, but the state’s job to defend the innocent with the physical sword. 

Time does not permit here to discuss how Magdeburg’s teaching on the duty of magistrates to defend with the sword might apply to our time.  Maybe at some time in the future it will be necessary to discuss it further. 

What should be obvious is that Christians have a duty not to comply with orders and laws from the government that require falsification of the Gospel or disobedience to God’s Law.  In such a case the government has no authority from God.  It is instituted by God to uphold His Law.  When it departs from that, it ceases to be an institution of God and becomes an institution of the devil.

Magdeburg explicitly uses the example of a government that by force of arms would compel a house-father to give his wife and daughter over to prostitution.  They argue that in such a case everyone would resist with arms without being told.  That section should strike every Lutheran reader today between the eyes.  It is true that our government does not compel our daughters to become prostitutes with physical force.  But it is also true that government, schools, and the media, by seduction and social pressure, are working to destroy marriage as God instituted it.  They do not do so by frontal attack—yet—but by praising and making exemplars of those who make a satanic mockery of marriage, who disfigure their bodies in warfare against God’s creation of man as male and female, and by, in some states, refusing to allow Christians who follow God’s Law on these matters to adopt or be foster parents, the American Interim makes war on God’s institution of marriage.

Conclusions

The Magdeburg Confession cries out from the closets of the Lutheran Church against our present submission to the American Interim. 

Chiefly by agreeing that religious and moral pluralism is God’s order, we have become interimists.  We may teach in our churches marriage as it is ordained by God; we may rightly administer the Sacraments and properly teach the article of justification.  But our witness is flaccid, because we have already agreed, de facto, not to question the American Interim’s commitment to utterly divorce the Law of God from the Kingdom of God’s left hand.

That’s the reason why, when we were told by the government to close our churches and worship on the internet instead, eight-five percent of the Missouri Synod complied.  After all, worship in person is an adiaphoron, as long as we are receiving the Word of God, many of us reasoned.  We tacitly agreed that God’s Word is a private matter, not something that demands obedience from every man, and especially from the government that God instituted to praise those who do well, to protect the Church and its members, and to punish the openly wicked.

The beginning of the solution to this problem is to speak against it in the Church.  Pastors and laymen should open their mouths and confess that the government is subject to the Law of God, that it has an obligation not to respect the private beliefs of its citizens but to require obedience to the Law that God inscribed with His finger on tablets of stone and which He has already inscribed on their hearts.

District conventions are coming up next year, followed by the Synodical convention.  Those who have the ability and the willingness ought to begin writing resolutions calling for repentance for the Church’s conduct during Covid and about the proper teaching about the two Kingdoms and resistance to tyrannical government.

In the meantime, as the time before the presidential election runs out, re-read the Magdeburg Confession and consider how you and your congregation will give a faithful witness the next time the government demands your formal subservience to the American Interim.