Outer Rim Territories

Ecumenicalism vs. Confessionalism

September 15th, 2006 | by Christopher Gillespie |  Print This Post

In my introduction to the Lutheran Carnival #32, I alluded to this text from Dr. Marquart Anatomy of an explosion: A theological analysis of the Missouri Synod conflict. This was written in 1977 and yet it is the same struggle we have today. Do we place our trust in numbers, results, interdenominational relations? Or do we trust in truth and faithfulness to the Gospel with rightful administration of Him in His Sacraments?

In Dr. Marquart’s discussion of the traditional “Missourian” position that was taken for granted that “Synod is not a church in the theological sense”, he gives this dense and well-spoken paragraph:

This deep seriousness about the church evinced at the time of the founding of the Missouri Synod was a far cry from the light-weight slogans, a century later, about mere “human organizations” and “demonimational tags!” Of course the early Missourians ken perfectly well that neither their little synod nor the Lutheran church as a whole was the one holy Christian church! Yet they also know that the only proper way of dealing with that one church is by faith, which means simply clinging to the pure marks of Christ’s church (Gospel and Sacraments). Blind human sight leads not to Jerusalem but to Babylon. The moment we let go of modest faith and depend on arrogant sight, we begin to hanker after numbers and outward grandeur. Then the boundaries between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, Gospel and pseudo-gospel, confession and denial, become confused, and we are ready victims for the spectacular counterfeit church of the great Ecumenical Compromise. Under the hypnotical spell of glamorous Ecumenical mirages and siren songs, mistaken for the one, holy church of Christ, formerly solemn confessions appear as mere “denominational tags,” and a confessional fellowship guided strictly by the pure marks of Christ’s church seems like a petty, “man-made” substitute for and obstacle to the glorious New Testament reality! The basic issue is very simply this: Is outward, organizational bigness, or confessional faithfulness and truthfulness the real key to the mystery of the New Testament church? The Lutheran Confessions (Augsburg Confession and Apology Articles VII and VIII) give one answer; the modern Ecumenical movement gives a radically different one.