What Lutheranism Taught Me: An Appreciative Look Back from a New Catholic

By: William Rhea

Altarpiece from Wittenburg by Lucas Cranach the Elder

INTRODUCTION

Almost one year ago my wife and I entered into full communion with the Catholic Church. We had been Lutherans for more than fifteen years after being raised in a variety of evangelical churches before discovering Lutheran theology in college. Without a doubt, becoming Lutheran was the formative event of our lives; after entering the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod I went to Concordia Seminary in St. Louis to begin a career lecturing in church history and biblical studies. However, in the summer and fall of 2019 we concluded that we would have to part ways with the Synod in order to complete our journey into the fullness of the apostolic church. However, I want to offer this as a meditation on the profound goods that can be found within Lutheran thought, even though I’ve come to find confessional Lutheran theology a severely truncated outline of the faith. Other influences independent of Lutheranism certainly played a substantial part in our decision: a commitment to the metaphysical realism of the church fathers and medieval scholastics; a growing conviction of the soundness of the New Perspective on Paul; a slowly dawning horror at all that had been cut out of Christian material and ritual culture even in the conservative Reformation; closer readings of the church fathers themselves and the newly discovered Second Temple backgrounds to Christianity; and time spent in the Holy Sepulchre, Israel, and the wider Eastern Mediterranean among the ancient rites. However, in large part, it was thinking through the fundamental lessons we learned when becoming Lutherans that ultimately led us to become Catholic. What follows in this and subsequent entries will occasionally sound like an apologia for Catholicism, tendentiously arguing from Lutheran premises to Catholic conclusions, but what I really hope to do is highlight what we have in common, and generously nod to the catholicity of the Lutheran confession.

A PRELIMINARY NOTE: A WORD ABOUT WHAT MY PARENTS AND THEIR CHURCHES TAUGHT ME

I don’t want it to sound, however, as though I knew nothing of Christianity before becoming Lutheran. I was raising in a broadly Protestant household, attending a Presbyterian church in early childhood and an evangelical megachurch throughout my teens, with a weird stint in the United Church of Christ in between. What I learned from my parents and these churches is the essential confession of our faith: That Jesus was the Son of God and that he died for our sins as a perfect sacrifice. I was taught to pray regularly, read my Bible, and given proper moral instruction. That is all anyone can ever ask for. Evangelicals deeply love Jesus and trust in him alone for their salvation, and that is where all Christians must begin. Much that here follows sets both Lutheranism, and Catholicism following it, in contrast to evangelical Protestantism as practiced in America, but I cannot say it loudly enough: The fundamental convictions of the faith were given to me by my parents within the context of evangelical Christianity, and that is a grace all its own.

THE FIRST LESSON: SUBMITTING MYSELF TO THE AUTHORITY AND CONTENT OF SCRIPTURE

When a philosophy professor (who later officiated at our wedding) and a new friend (who served as a groomsman) convinced me to become Lutheran, they taught me to submit myself to Scripture in a new way. As a teenager in an evangelical megachurch, I’d been taught to think of myself as a Bible-believing Christian. But what that largely meant was that I learned Bible stories, and was supposed to believe they really happened: Jonah was really swallowed by a giant fish; David really squared off against Goliath; Daniel really survived the lions’ den. In that sense, submitting myself to the authority of Scripture was nothing new. However, as my professor and friend guided me through a careful reading of St. Paul, I realized just how little I knew of the Scriptures. Beyond the Bible stories I had learned as a child in Presbyterian Sunday school, the doctrinal content of Scripture had been a blur. I knew the stories about Jesus’ baptism and the feeding of the five thousand; I had no idea what Paul said about baptism in Galatians 3 or Romans 6, or the Eucharistic overtones of Jesus’ meal on the road to Emmaus. I had been encouraged to memorize individual verses that served as vague inspiration for feelings about Jesus or moral guidelines. That, after all, was the rudimentary way Scripture was used in sermons: a brief spark that served to Christianize the moralistic and therapeutic deism that has infected the soul of evangelical piety (a diagnosis that comes from evangelicals themselves like Mark Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and Michael Horton in Christless Christianity). The kind of intellectual submission to the doctrinal content of Scripture demanded by historic Protestantism – Lutheran and Calvinist – was lost on me. When the scriptures are searched for doctrinal content in the world of contemporary evangelicalism, the creative energies of theologians are all too often diverted to the ongoing debates surrounding creationism and dispensationalism. The Bible itself is mined for proof-texts in support of predetermined views, rather than as being a covenantally-structured salvation history that connects organically with a catholic body of doctrine. Lutheranism taught me to submit myself intellectually to the authority of God as manifest in the Scriptures. Of course, I do not believe in Sola Scriptura, and I’m not sure I ever did, depending on the definition. However one defines the Reformation’s formal principle, it becomes increasingly difficult to see the authority of God effectively functioning through the Bible alone in anything like a meaningful way when one surveys the whole range of Protestantism. Even though Lutherans, in a manner similar to Anglicans, often apply Sola Scriptura in a manner that attempts to be consistent with the ancient ecumenical councils (or at least the doctrinal definitions of the first four) and church fathers (at least on one selective reading of Augustine), the results are mixed at best, and there is no consensus on even this definition of Sola Scriptura in Lutheranism (as in Anglicanism). The appeal not only of an authoritative tradition of liturgical celebration and episcopal governance, but of a living magisterial voice, became stronger and stronger. But aside from the arguments for the Catholic perspective, it was Lutheranism that taught me to intellectually submit myself to authorities higher than myself, wherever the authority of God is exercised. Submitting myself not only to Scripture, but to the symphonic consensus of the church fathers and the magisterial interpretations of the episcopacy, the councils, and the papacy, is an extension of that lesson. And that submission is, I tell you, liberating.

To be continued in the second lesson: the theology of the cross and the primacy of grace.

About the author: William Rhea holds degrees in Political Science and Historical Theology from Messiah College and Concordia Seminary. Mr. Rhea currently teaches theology at Christ Mission College in San Antonio, where he currently resides with his wife Maria. William and Maria attend Our Lady of the Atonement, an Anglican patrimonial parish in the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter, where they were received into the Catholic Church in 2019.