St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology

Lutheran Ecclesiology
Jonathan Mumme

First published: 29 August 2024

https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/LutheranEcclesiology

Citation
Mumme, Jonathan. 2024. 'Lutheran Ecclesiology', St Andrews Encyclopaedia of
Theology. Edited by Brendan N. Wolfe et al. https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/
LutheranEcclesiology Accessed: 14 June 2025

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Copyright © Jonathan Mumme CC BY-NC

Preprint: this text represents an accepted version of the article. A full published version is
forthcoming.

ISSN 2753-3492
Lutheran Ecclesiology
Jonathan Mumme

Lutheran ecclesiology is an outgrowth of a reform movement within the Western Church

and shares scriptural underpinnings with this broader tradition. The Lutheran reformers’
convictions about the church and the basic contours of an ecclesiology found binding
expression in the Lutheran confessions of the sixteenth century. Already in the sixteenth
century, certain structural categories – often weighed in theologically productive pairings
– began to shape and convey much of Lutheranism’s ecclesiology. The church’s
visibility and hiddenness; faith and the means of grace; the nature and the marks of the
church; and the relationship between congregation and ministry can all be examined
with an overarching diagnostic tool of internality and externality. Both the sixteenth-
century confessions and subsequent works of Lutheran ecclesiology responded to the
contexts in which they were forged, as the reformers and their historical heirs sought
to think about and live as the church amid shifting social, philosophical, and political
circumstances. Efforts over the last hundred years have therefore been shaped not
just by the confessions, but also by theological developments from the Reformation to
seventeenth-century Orthodoxy, the Enlightenment, and the intellectual sea changes
of the nineteenth century. Lutherans address some general theological concerns that
relate to ecclesiology a common manner. At the same time Lutheran forms of ecclesial life
have both reflected and framed more distinctly Lutheran theologies of the church along
somewhat different trajectories, with Lutherans living under bishops, in state churches, in
free churches, or often in some democratized amalgamation thereof. Modern Lutheran
ecclesiological efforts have taken shape as regional or national groups of Lutherans
have sought association, federation, and communion with one another, and as they have
attempted ecumenical rapprochement with other Christians. Now informed by a polyphonic
ecclesiological discourse in an increasingly secular age, Lutheran ecclesiologies seek
to present the church as a creature of the gospel while articulating the place, role, and
responsibility of Christians in and for this community.

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Table of contents
1 Introduction

2 Late-mediaeval ecclesiology

3 Ecclesiology of the reformers and in the confessions

3.1 General characteristics against German and Nordic backgrounds

3.2 Symbolical expression (the Lutheran confessions)

3.3 Theologically productive pairings at the headwaters of the tradition

3.3.1 Invisible and visible

3.3.2 Faith and the means of grace

3.3.3 Church and marks of the church

3.3.4 Ministry (Amt) and congregation (Gemeinde)

3.4 Internality and externality as ecclesiological diagnostic

4 Historical unfolding

4.1 Orthodoxy and enlightenment

4.2 The long nineteenth century

4.3 Recent and contemporary

4.4 Polities and particular ecclesial trajectories

4.4.1 Germany

4.4.2 Nordic countries

4.4.3 America

4.4.4 Amalgamations

4.5 Lutheran approaches to general ecclesiological concerns

4.5.1 Israel and eschatology

4.5.2 The church and the state

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5 Current state of play

5.1 Federations, communions, and associations

5.2 Ecumenism and post-ecumenism

5.3 Directions toward the future

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1 Introduction
In 1521, students of theology at the university of Wittenberg got a new textbook: the
Theological Commonplaces of Philipp Melanchthon. Like Thomas Aquinas’ Summa
Theologica and Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the first edition of this work contained no
section dedicated to the church. Although Christians had always spoken about the church,
it took the reformations of the sixteenth century to make ecclesiology commonplace,
a topic in its own right. By Melanchthon’s later years, ecclesiology was coming into a
contested standing of its own. Within the span of this Wittenberger’s career, it had become
necessary to say, ‘what the church of God is and where it is’, for these disputed questions
related to how God himself was to be known (Melanchthon 2011: 240). Disputes over the
church’s understanding of itself, which began in the late Middle Ages, boiled over in the
sixteenth century. With the 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg, the Holy Roman Empire of
the German Nation took a fateful step, one that would have been unimaginable a century
before: it allowed its estates to live under divergent confessions of the Christian faith.
As a Lutheran form of Christian life solidified in some regions of the empire, and as the
Lutheran Reformation shaped the Nordic and Baltic regions, Lutheran ecclesiology came
to be an exercise in ‘contextual dogmatics’ (Anselm 2000), with particular socio-political
situations not only raising new questions but also stipulating the parameters of theological
discourse and ecclesial life. Emigration and mission work of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries spread Lutheran Christians and churches around the globe. The twentieth
century saw the formation of international Lutheran organizations and ecclesiological
production spurred by the ecumenical movement and keen to pursue greater unity with
other Christians. Lutheran ecclesiology bears in mind a certain foundation in the sixteenth
century and subsequent historical unfolding, as it seeks to speak about the church in view
of the gospel, present a form of ecclesial life commensurate with the gospel, and embrace
fellowship under the gospel.

2 Late-mediaeval ecclesiology
The Lutheran ecclesiology of the sixteenth century took shape as the Western church
cracked and fragmented. Western ecclesial disintegration did not, however, begin in the
sixteenth century: the investiture controversy, the sweeping claims of the high-mediaeval
papacy, the Western schism, and the countervailing curialist and conciliarist movements
all contributed to an ecclesial crisis to which the first treatises on the church, written in the
late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, bore witness (Tierney 1988; Tanner 2018). Without
absolute uniformity, Western Christians shared a common faith, and although it was not
a monolith, they inhabited a common church. Degrees of pious and local flexibility were
possible, but these Christians’ catholicity assumed that significant differences of theology
had to be examined and prosecuted to a conclusion, and that the church did and must live

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as one. What precisely the church was, how it would deal with its differences, and how
it would and would not live together had not been codified. In the late Middle Ages, the
church itself was becoming a topic of the church’s theological interest, and the political and
ecclesial stakes surrounding the matter were high.

Because of its subsequent implications, the Reformation is often considered as a period

in its own right, but ecclesiologically the Lutheran Reformation is of a piece with the late
Middle Ages, and it must be understood in view of two significant challenges that faced the
late-mediaeval church. First, canon law was in a state of crisis; its positive development
had ceased around the twelfth century, as the ultimate claims of the papacy were being
established (Maurer 1976). In the wake of medieval debates surrounding the Mass, the
church was spoken of as the mystical body of Christ as opposed to the true body, which
was found in the Eucharist. A conceptual wedge was driven between the sacramental
and governmental aspects of ecclesial life (Oakley 1979: 157–174). The concept of the
church and ecclesial authority underwent an undue spiritualization while discussion of its
governance was unduly secularized (Frank 1978). So, as canon law attempted to get its
head around the spiritual and corporate elements of Christian social existence, the chief
topic of interest became the operation of the church’s jurisdictional authority in the external
forum (potestas iurisdictionis in foro externo). Secondly, at this same time the prince-
bishops (Fürstbischöfe) of the northern regions of the empire were chiefly concerned with
management of their territories and holdings, and not with the overseeing catechesis,
preaching, and the sacramental administration of their dioceses – tasks most often left
to subordinate clergy. These bishops oversaw estates of the empire, some in the highest
echelons of its governmental workings. Any reform of their station or the duties of their
office implied tinkering with the politics of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

The roots of Lutheran ecclesiology lie in this period of developing ecclesiologies, which
drew from a common scriptural, patristic, and medieval tradition, and which faced an
ecclesially challenging situation with wide-ranging political implications. The assertions of
the Lutheran reformers about the church, particularly those received into the confessions
of the Lutheran tradition, do not constitute an alternative to a previously established
standard of orthodoxy; instead, they claim to represent the ancient tradition in the crisis of
the church as it turned from the late Middle Ages to the early modern era.

3 Ecclesiology of the reformers and in the

confessions
The foundation for ecclesiology in the Lutheran tradition is shared with the rest of
mainstream Christianity: the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. These sacred
texts form the basis of ecclesial deliberation and theological formulation; explicitly or
implicitly they have been recognized as the ultimate norm for Christian doctrine, including

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by the 1577 Formula of Concord of the Book of Concord (BC: 486). The confessions to
which Lutheran churches subscribe enjoy an authoritative status as exhibitions of the
teachings of holy scripture. The confessional standards of Lutheran churches vary to some
degree from place to place, but generally they accept the ancient creeds and several
confessions of the sixteenth century that were eventually assembled in the 1580 Book
of Concord. Without according their works any official status, Lutherans have tended to
recognize Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon as figures standing at the headwaters of
their tradition, as well as theologians and clergy who have been seminal in specific places,
as for example Olaus and Laurentius Petri in Sweden.

3.1 General characteristics against German and Nordic

backgrounds
When Martin Luther declared in his Smalcald Articles that any catechized seven-year-old
child knew that the church was ‘the little sheep who hear the voice of their shepherd’ (SA
III,xii:1; The Augsburg Confession 2000: 324–325), he was using a biblical image: a
shepherd or pastor along with his sheep or flock. As theologians at the ground level of
the Lutheran Reformation spoke about the church as a subject of theological interest,
they did so with reference to the holy scriptures, which they sought to make the basis
of their ecclesiological ideas. As others before and after them, they contemplated and
drew upon images for the church provided by these most sacred texts of the Christian
tradition (Minear 2004). With opponents loyal to the pope as the head of the church,
Lutherans particularly debated those passages of the New Testament that served as
evidence for a primacy of Peter and, by extension, as justification for the Roman curia’s
claim to universal supremacy (e.g. Matt 16:18–19; John 21:15–17). In treating the
scriptures as the word of God in written form, the Lutherans were in full agreement
with theologians loyal to the papacy. Disagreement about the place of the scriptures
in the ecclesial systems that governed the church’s teaching and life could crop up,
as did questions about authoritative interpretation. But for theologians of the sixteenth
century, the books of the Bible were authoritative as writings of prophetic and apostolic
origin, behind which stood the Holy Spirit. Lutherans shared these common convictions.
Not all texts bore equal ecclesiological import, but Lutherans, like other readers, were
operating well before the critical methodologies of a subsequent era, and so they took
Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Epistles – all books with serious ecclesiological
weight – to be genuinely Pauline. They held the holy scriptures to be clear and placed
their interpretation and exposition among the chief duties of university theologians,
under curricular revisions shaped by Renaissance humanism. On an ecclesial level, the
sixteenth-century confessions and church orders entrusted judgment of doctrine, on the
basis of the scriptures, to bishops and superintendents (CA XXVIII:21; [CPCE] 2018: 94–
95).

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As with most names that subsequently come to be associated -isms, Luther’s theology
can be distinguished from appropriations and representations of it in the subsequent
tradition. A papally excommunicated son of the Western church, around 1520 he decried
the captivity of that which was sacred to the church under the Roman curia, while
affirming local oversight and governance of the church and calling on the nobility and civil
authorities to act for its good. None of this was unprecedented. In fact, the ecclesial reform
program of Electoral Saxony, led in part by Luther and Melanchthon, was an attempt
to reinstate a churchly form of episcopacy. It entailed visitation; oversight of teaching,
sacramental practice, and the care of souls; and ordination carried out by super-ordered
ministers: the parsons and superintendents (Elert 1967b; Kretschmar 1995). Though
attempts at evangelical bishoprics were doomed to eventual failure by the politics of the
empire in which prince-bishops and -archbishops ruled ecclesiastical estates (Wendebourg
1997), these German reformers were aiming at a spiritually and institutionally integrated
pattern of ecclesial life, according to which the church would again be governed under
the doctrinal and sacramental authority of ministers operating on the local and regional
level. Instead, they got a further step in the bifurcating trajectory of the later Middle Ages: a
church governed by an external authority distinct from sacramental-ministerial authority, a
church organized under the heads of state (das landesherrliche Kirchenregiment), bishop-
like princes. Consequentially, their German heirs had to, and did, come to terms with this
set of affairs for three centuries.

The reform of the Nordic countries was also magisterial, but more so. Danish and Swedish
kings, whose forebears under the crown had at times struggled with a church governed
from Rome, strengthened their sovereign hold on their territories and further unified their
kingdoms in the Lutheran-led reform of their churches. With the end of the Kalmar Union
in 1523, the once-united kingdom was split into Denmark, Norway, and Iceland on the
one hand, and Sweden with Finland on the other. Johannes Bugenhagen, the parson of
Wittenberg, played a major role in King Christian III’s reforms of the Danish kingdom. In
addition to crowning the king, he composed a church order and consecrated the first seven
superintendents – later referred to as bishops – under whom the diocesan structure of
the Danish church was preserved. King Gustav Vasa of Sweden was interested in a state
church dependent on its king. Not only did the crown absorb much ecclesial property, he
curtailed the power of the bishops to a certain degree, forcing Bishop Peder Månsson
of Västerås to consecrate bishops for open dioceses in Sweden and Finland – a move
that would make the Church of Sweden an attractive ecumenical partner for the Church
of England in the twentieth century, since the Church of Sweden maintained an apostolic
succession understood to proceed by chain of episcopal consecrations.

3.2 Symbolical expression (the Lutheran confessions)

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The Lutheran reformers were sometimes called upon to offer official formulation of
doctrine for and on behalf of the territories that had followed their teachings and adopted
certain ecclesial reforms based on them. As such formulations were received into the
ecclesiastical structures of regions that adopted Lutheran reforms of the church, they
achieved a recognizable status as symbols or confessions of the church. The Augsburg
Confession (Confessio Augustana, CA) of 1530 enjoys ubiquitous standing in the
Lutheran tradition. Before the initially pejorative moniker ‘Lutheran’ stuck, the ecclesial
heirs of the Wittenberg reformation spoke of themselves as ‘churches of the Augsburg
Confession’ (FC–SD, Binding Summary: 2, 8; [CPCE] 2018: 526, 528). This document
is best interpreted in its historical context, as well as in view of the imperial Confutation
that responded to it and Melanchthon’s Apology (Ap) that offered further explanation of
it. Luther’s Small Catechism (SC) usually stands alongside the Augustana as a received
confession in Lutheran churches, as often do Luther’s Large Catechism (LC), his Smalcald
Articles (SA), and Melanchthon’s Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope (Tr).

The Augsburg Confession presents the church as a perpetually existing, historical

reality: ‘the assembly of saints in which the gospel is taught purely and the sacraments
are administered rightly’ (CA VII:1; [CPCE] 2018: 43). Two consequential facets of this
compact, dogmatic definition must be noted. On the one hand, the church is described in a
mysterious, creedal manner, with ‘assembly of saints’ (congregatio sanctorum) paralleling
‘communion of saints’ (communio sanctorum) in the Apostles’ Creed. The German version
of the Augustana calls these saints ‘believers’, thereby referencing the justifying faith
of its fourth article, which was fiercely contended by the Confutation of 1530 ([CPCE]
2018: 38–41; Kolb and Nestingen 2001: 108–109). Like God the Father Almighty, the
resurrected Christ, and the eschatological resurrection of the body, the saints or believers
are not simply visible now. On the other hand, they are by no means invisible, but are
mysteriously or sacramentally congregated by ministerially proffered, external, bodily
means – the gospel and the sacraments – that the Holy Spirit uses to work this justifying
faith (CA V; [CPCE] 2018: 40–41). Against charges to the contrary by the leading pro-
papal theologian Johann Eck, AC XIV affirmed that public preaching and teaching and
the administration of the sacraments – the duties of the ecclesiastical ministry instituted
by God – required ordination ([CPCE] 2018: 46–47), and Melanchthon’s Apology affirmed
the desire to see canonical ordination under the bishops continue (Ap XIV; [CPCE] 2018:
222–223). Thus, the Augustana’s definition of the church simultaneously recognizes a
mysterious and hidden internality of faith alongside the ministerially mediated, sacramental
externality of the liturgical assembly. The theological ordering of these two factors – and
the neglect of one for a hegemonic propagation of the other – has shaped various streams
of ecclesiology in the Lutheran tradition.

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Four further factors characterize the ecclesiology presented in the primary sixteenth-
century confessions of the Lutheran tradition. First, those adhering to this movement
understood themselves to be participating in a patristically established pattern of asserting
the truth of Christian doctrine over against errors that had cropped up against it (FC-
SD Preface and Binding Summary: 1–5; [CPCE] 2018: 524–570). As they engaged in a
simultaneously theological and practical act of confession, they presented themselves as
heirs of the Western Christian tradition and exemplars of its lineage, claiming that their
churches did ‘not dissent from the catholic church in any article of faith’, and that nothing in
their confession or ecclesial practice ‘depart[ed] from the Scriptures or the catholic church
or from the Roman church’, insofar as could be ascertained from its writers (CA Abuses
Corrected:1 and Conclusion of Part One:1; [CPCE] 2018: 61, 59).

Their attempt to address ecclesiology and ecclesial practice in a traditional manner was
tied to a second factor: the confessors approached the church not solely or even chiefly
in a conceptual manner, but as a perpetually existing historical reality manifested and
experienced in churches, i.e. in local and areal manifestations of the church – in ecclesial
realities like bishoprics, parishes, and/or the church in a region, territory, or city. The civil
authorities who presented the Augsburg Confession to Charles V offered a confession of
what ‘the churches among [them]’ taught (CA I:1; Communion of Protestant Churches in
Europe (CPCE): 37); the Small Catechism begins by upbraiding the bishops for neglecting
their office before appealing to the parsons and preachers to properly discharge theirs
(Preface:1–6; [CPCE] 2018: 347–348); the Smalcald Articles compare churches in the
territories of the Smalcald League to bishoprics and parishes elsewhere (Preface:10;
[CPCE] 2018: 299). Ecclesiology began on the ground, with the factual and experienced
realities of the church in the churches.

Thirdly, the church for and in view of which the confessions operate is an institutional
reality. Not only is it built on the ministry (Tr 25; [CPCE] 2018: 334), it is governed by
the clergy, to whom belongs the peculiar ecclesial authority (potestas ecclesiastica) of
order (potestas ordinis), i.e. to preach the word and administer the sacraments, and of
jurisdiction (potestas iurisdictionis), i.e. to judge doctrine and exercise the lesser ban –
including on a regional or diocesan level (CA and Ap XXVIII; [CPCE] 2018: 90–103, 289–
294; Mumme 2015a). It is not necessary for the unity of church that rites and ceremonies
be the same everywhere. At the same time, the bishops – who are to ‘keep diligently
together in unity of teaching, faith, sacraments, prayers, and works of love, etc’. (SA
II,iv:9 [CPCE] 2018: 308) – are accorded authority to regulate the churches’ practices
and liturgical life, so long as extra-biblical stipulations are not declared necessary for the
salvation of those under their care (CA XV, XXVI; [CPCE] 2018: 48–49, 74–79).

Fourthly, returning the two facets observable in CA VII, the ecclesiology of the confessions
honours the believer as an individual who can say, ‘the Holy Spirit has called me through

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the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts’, and at the same time integrates that believer into
what the Holy Spirit does for ‘the whole Christian church on earth’ (SC Creed:6; [CPCE]
2018: 355). Any believer and all believers receive and experience the full, self-giving
communion of the Triune God (LC Creed:67–69; [CPCE] 2018: 440) not in some dreamlike
and ideal ecclesial reality that does not exist in the world (Ap VII:20; [CPCE] 2018: 177),
but in a historical, mysteriously tangible, and institutional reality that is encountered locally.

The foundations of Lutheran ecclesiology, as expounded in the sixteenth century, lie

primarily with the exposition of the holy scriptures and come into recognized expression
in the confessions of the sixteenth century. The scriptural basis means that Lutheran
ecclesiology operates on the most common foundation of Christian theology. The Lutheran
confessions do not claim to be the limit or extension of ecclesiology, but historically they
may not be bypassed or contradicted by presentations of the church that claim to be
Lutheran. The impetuses taken from scripture and insights from the reformers received in
the churches’ confessional standards – as well as how the two intermingle – shape much
of how ecclesiology unfolds in the Lutheran tradition.

3.3 Theologically productive pairings at the headwaters of the

tradition
As Lutheran churches and theologians have considered the church as a topic of theology
in their dogmatic and constructive systems and in view of their shifting socio-political
contexts, their work has often developed structural categories already observable in the
sixteenth century. Some of the most important of these categories operate in pairs – pairs,
that is, of theological concerns and ecclesial factors that are drawn to each other, live in
tension with one another, or both. These pairings can be considered in their own right and
also in view of an underlying dynamic of internality and externality that informs them all.

Whatever other topics they may raise, most Lutheran presentations of ecclesiology
will address something like the following four questions: How is the church invisible,
visible, or both, and what terminology is suited to properly describe it in this regard? If
the church is the assembly of believers, how does their collectively held faith relate to the
means of grace? What marks the church such that it may be recognized? How does the
congregation or assembly relate to the ministry?

Before turning to the subsequent historical unfolding of Lutheran ecclesiology, in which

these categories continued to play important roles, the following sections address these
theologically productive pairings in view of the sixteenth century.

3.3.1 Invisible and visible

Ecclesiology must weigh the church as a mysterious fellowship that relates to Christ as
both bride and body; at the same time attending to the church as a local assembly and

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regional reality. This is due to the productive ambiguity of the term ekklēsia in the New
Testament itself. In the sixteenth century it was Zwingli who first put forward visibility and
invisibility as categories for this task. Further shaping what would become the Reformed
tradition, Calvin asserted that, in the proper sense, the church was the invisible fellowship
of the elect in Christ. In the later, revised editions of his Commonplaces, Melanchthon
takes up this pairing somewhat begrudgingly, as pressed on him by opponents. An
invisible church would be a figment of the imagination, he contends; there are no elect
outside the visible assembly of the called (Melanchthon 2011: 239). Not only is the
church visible, it is local and temporal, described as those who confess true doctrine
and passively receive what God actively delivers through the ministry (Melanchthon
1982: §29). Yet this liturgically described assembly, which invokes the name of Christ
and rightly calls on God, is hidden – not least under persecution and the cross – until
the eschatological manifestation of the kingdom of God at the second coming of Christ
(Melanchthon 1982: §30; cf. Prenter 1967: 530). Though Luther could, for example, state
that, ‘[t]he church is hidden, the saints are unknown’ (1525; LW 33:89), his ecclesiology
also did not operate under the influential structural principle of visibility and invisibility. Like
medieval thinkers before him, he understood the church as one of three estates instituted
by God, a hierarchy endowed with divine authority and having a divinely instituted ministry
or order that governed it. As a continual reality the church moved through history (1541;
LW 41:207). Among the unsettled and competing ecclesiological options of the waning
Middle Ages (Jedin 1968), Luther sought to present the church as a pneumatological
reality from a position of a qualified conciliarism.

3.3.2 Faith and the means of grace

According to Luther, the church was a creature of the word – the word of the gospel (1519;
WA 2:430,6–7; 1520; LW 36: 107). Against all spiritualism and any bare internality of
faith, Luther maintained that the faith of the communion of saints hangs on the gospel
externally and orally preached and on tangible elements, such as water taken into
God’s ordinance (LC Baptism: 28–30; [CPCE] 2018: 460). The preached word and the
administered sacraments of baptism, the Lord’s supper, and absolution are realities that
offer themselves to perception by the senses, while simultaneously being media through
which the Holy Spirit operates to create and sustain saving faith. Following this conviction,
it became common among Lutherans to speak of them as organs or instruments of
salvation, or as means of grace. Specifying the gospel as ‘the divine proclamation in which
men […] are presented with the most gracious promise of God’, Melanchthon explained
the sacraments as ‘signs and pledges of divine grace, the application and appropriation of
grace (1555: §9, 19). Distinct from ceremonies of a sacrificial nature, these are ‘decreed
so that God may give us something (1982: §23) Their relationship to faith, salvation by
faith, and to the church as the assembly of believers has been presented with various
accents in the Lutheran tradition. The basic conviction that the church is created by the

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word of God (Schwöbel 1989) – that it is a creature of the gospel – has become a set
piece of Lutheran ecclesiology received from Luther.

3.3.3 Church and marks of the church

Inasmuch as the Western church was dividing at the time of the Lutheran reformation, a
pressing question arose as to how the church could be identified. The structural category
of the church and its marks is closely related to the category of faith and the means
of grace, but it operates somewhat more broadly. Inasmuch as the reformers and the
Lutheran confessions affirmed and continued to use the ancient creeds, Lutherans
liturgically repeat and have always said that the church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic
(Mumme 2020: 157–158). The reformers understood the churchs unity as concord in
saving faith underwritten by scripturally normed and episcopally overseen teaching,
by orthodox sacramental practice, and by proper if not ubiquitously uniform liturgical
celebration. They presented catholicity chiefly as a matter of historical and theological
continuity; thus, the Augsburg Confession claimed that it departed from no article of the
faith in doctrine or practice. In addition to constant appeal to the prophetic and apostolic
scriptures as the highest authority in the church, the reformers understood and maintained
an apostolic continuity in their ministerial orders (Mumme 2015b: 63–66, 123–166;
Piepkorn 2006: 26). In a much–contested atmosphere leading up to what would become
the Council of Trent, Luther took up the creedal attribute of holiness and claimed that
the church was ‘a Christian holy people (1539; LW 41: 143–167; Yeago 1997). The Holy
Spirit made the church this particular people by hallowing it through the word, baptism,
the supper, and the absolution of sins under the authority of the keys, all of which were
entrusted to consecrated ministers. Luther could speak of such marks of the church
as treasures established and left behind by Christ (Mumme 2015b: 224–233), which
operate in the present as gifts passed down through the church as a historically existing
reality (1541; LW 41:193–224). Similarly, Melanchthon asserted that the church was
characterized by the uncorrupted profession of the doctrine of the gospel, by the use of
the sacraments in accord with their divine institution, and by obedience to the ministers of
the gospel (1955: 212, 286). Inasmuch as the church was seen a transtemporal guardian
of the word operative in the ministry (Melanchthon 2011: 245) at a time when the content
of that word was being debated, it also became common for Lutherans to recognize an
orthodox and ministerially overseen confessional standard as a mark of the church (Elert
1967a: 146).

3.3.4 Ministry (Amt) and congregation (Gemeinde)

In the day-to-day life of the church, there is always some kind of reciprocal relationship
between ministry and congregation, that is between ministers and the assembly of
believers as such. The systematic-theological ordering of these ecclesial elements and the
implications of that ordering for the life of a given church are thus a weighty matter of both

12
doctrine and practice. Two of the Augsburg Confessions doctrinal articles directly treat
the ministry, the first (CA V) in its central tasks of preaching the word and administering
the sacraments, the second (CA XIV) in connection with the need for proper ordination
of ministers. That squares with Luther’s understanding of the ministry as a particular
office, established by Christs sending of the apostles, and passing in a historically
enduring fashion through ordination (1535, LW 26:17; Mumme 2015b: 233–255). Like
him, Melanchthon also understood ministers to be endowed with a real pneumatic
authority through which they governed the church (1555: §28; Mumme 2015a). With
this pairing, however, we encounter a striking shift in interpretation, as the confessional
text is reread in a modern context. At the 1530 Diet of Augsburg, the emperor and the
papally loyal theologians behind the Confutation accepted CA V, understanding it to
assign the ministry of word and sacraments to an authoritative office, much as Luther
and Melanchthon did (cf. Pannenberg 1990: 297). Under later democratic sentiment, the
article has often been reinterpreted in light of the idea of a ‘priesthood of all believers’.
Many contemporary Lutherans draw a distinction between the fifth and fourteenth articles.
CA V, they maintain, refers to ministry in general, as a functionally defined task that is
the responsibility and right of all believers, while CA XIV requires ordination for public
preaching and administration of the sacraments. This reading of the Augsburg Confession
– one that asserts a general form of ministry resting on a basic right of all Christians to
preach and administer the sacraments – may be a constructive re-interpretation of the text;
but it marks a significant departure from the original meaning of the relevant articles, as
they were understood both by the reformers and by their early opposing interlocutors.

3.4 Internality and externality as ecclesiological diagnostic

At the Leipzig Debate of 1519 and in his mature years, Luther prioritized the factual to
the conceptual and the external to the internal as he set about the task of ecclesiology
(Mumme 2019). His ecclesiological pattern generally aligns with Melanchthons focus on
the visible assembly of the called, which distinguished itself as the true church from the
false church by way of its confession of Christian teaching, its sacraments, and its ministry
(1555: §28–29).

When the Augsburg Confession asserted that human beings are justified as a gift through
faith in Christ "when they believe that they are received into grace and that their sins are
forgiven" (IV:2; [CPCE] 2018: 41), it installed an irreducibly internal and self-referential
element at the heart of what would become Lutheranisms most recognized confessional
standard. Especially given the prominence of the doctrine of justification in the Lutheran
tradition, the ecclesial consequences have been prodigious. CA IV (Of Justification) is,
however, fused to CA V, such that when their collective content is theologically ordered,
this internality of faith is preceded by the externality of the physically communicated word
and the sacraments, through which the Holy Spirit works justifying faith. Luther could not

13
have been more explicit in the ordering of externality and internality – and by extension
of the factual-historical and the conceptual (Mumme 2019: 267–277) – in the Holy Spirits
dealings with human beings. ‘[T]he external word […] goes before (SA III,viii:3; [CPCE]
2018: 322). In part an inheritance of Augustines anti-Donatist sacramentology, in part a
conviction solidified over against radical reform movements of the 1520s, Luthers belief
in the primacy of the external to the internal in Gods saving dealings with human beings
would be lost on or abandoned by many of his historical heirs within the Lutheran tradition
– and that with consequential ecclesiological results.

4 Historical unfolding
Until the nineteenth century the main theatres of Lutheran ecclesiology were Germanic
lands of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which faded as an empire while
its territories struggled toward nation-statehood, and the Nordic lands, whose kingdoms
proved stable venues for the establishment of Lutheran churches in Lutheran states.
Emigration, foreign missions, and the revolutions of the long nineteenth century raised new
questions for the church, as did the international exchange and ecumenical spirit of the
twentieth.

4.1 Orthodoxy and enlightenment

Various national stripes of a Lutheran monoculture took shape in the Nordic countries after
the Reformation. The Danish state became a combination of its nation and its church,
with the king at the head of both. The parish functioned as the basic unity of society, and
the parish clergy were civil servants. King Karl XI’s church law of 1686 specified that all
citizens of the Kingdom of Sweden must confess the faith of the whole Book of Concord.
Not until the eighteenth century were Calvinists, Roman Catholics, or Jews tolerated, and
first in the nineteenth century was conversion to another denomination legally sanctioned.

These Nordic manifestations of confessionalization were mirrored by developments in

Germany. There too ecclesiology unfolded as an operation of controversial theology, but
on a confessionally chequered map, where Lutheran territories often bordered those of
Roman Catholics or with Calvinist sentiment. Given the confessional patchwork of the land
now known as Germany, Lutheran ecclesiological efforts during the age of orthodoxy could
be aimed in different but related directions. On the one hand, there were confessional
and polemical operations, in which theologians took aim at Roman Catholic and Calvinist
opponents, either challenging their understandings of the church, the ministry, and the
sacraments, or mounting defences against charges levelled by them. On the other hand,
there were efforts to heal the established but perhaps not yet utterly hardened divisions of
Western Christendom.

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Against Roman Catholic opponents the Centuriators of Magdeburg, a bastion of the gnesio
type of Lutheranism in the turbulent period following Luthers death, offered an ecclesial
history that legitimated the existence of a Lutheran type of church living separate from
Rome. The Magdeburg Centuries by Matthias Flacius and Johannes Wigand evinces a
clear interest in the historical continuity of the church, especially as regards its doctrine,
which functions as a sometimes clearer and fuller and sometimes dimmer and reduced
presentation of the light of divine truth. Although they thought, in some sense, in the
direction of church as defined by its confession of the faith, the Centuriators did not
reduce the church or its historical continuity simply to a matter of doctrine; instead, they
recognized a visible church effected in a structured form by the word, to which preachers
of the word belonged as organs and instruments (Wagner 1973: 13–84). The Roman front
also played a significant role in works like Johann Gerhards Theological Commonplaces.
When it came to his loci on the church and the ministry, Gerhard had no interlocutor
more important than Robert Bellarmine, whose Disputations on the Controversies of the
Christian Faith, had, for example, asserted that church was just as visible as the Kingdom
of France or the Republic of Venice. Entering the controversialist fray, Gerhard debated not
only the nature and identity of the church along the lines of visibility and invisibility, but also
ministerial issues, such as the distinction between bishops and presbyters as a matter of
divine right (Gerhard 2010: 70–142; 2012: 48–63).

At the same time, German Lutherans were also pressed to call attention to ecclesiological
distinctions that separated them from Calvinists. This direction of controversialism proved
somewhat more delicate though no less stormy, inasmuch as Calvinism as yet had no
legal standing in the Holy Roman Empire and could exist only insofar as Crypto-Calvinism
infiltrated Lutheran lands and institutions. One such a Lutheran-Calvinist controversy arose
between the Hamburg parson Philipp Nicolai, and Urban Pierius, erstwhile court preacher
in Dresden and professor at the University of Wittenberg who was eventually jailed for his
Calvinist teachings. The substance of their rupture was ministerial (Baur 1980: 119–126).
Nicolai asserted that, based on Gods promises, God was present in the ministry, indeed
in the preachers mouth. Pleading and anti-magical case, Pierius contended that God as
sovereign subject did not thus bind himself to the finite, and that such a predication of the
concrete presence of God was injurious in objectifying God. In a mode similar to Lutheran-
Calvinist debates surrounding the Lords supper, the heart of this disagreement orbited the
questions of Gods self-binding and his presence as mediated a finite instrument such that
his presence could be claimed in a specific place, i.e. through the ministerial service of a
specific person. Pierius contended that only a spiritual power and divine activity could be
claimed of the ministry, since a spiritual immediacy exists between God and Christians and
since such concreteness as Nicolai claimed would threaten the sovereignty of God and
the freedom of the Christian subject. According to Nicolai the ministry had a theophoric
character; according to Pierius it did not and could not.

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The solidifying of confessional lines that generally took place during the period of
orthodoxy did not mean that some theologians were not openly working towards a
reunification of Western Christianity. Georg Calixt of the University of Helmstedt used
his chair of controversialist theology to pursue an irenic and conciliatory theological
path (Fry 1979). Shaped by the Thirty Years War, he sought to identify a way toward
ecclesial peace (Mayes 2004). Following Nicolaus Hunnius’ distinction of fundamental and
nonfundamental articles of the faith, Calixt suggested different doctrines were of different
import: some were antecedent and self-evident; others constitutive as teachings divinely
revealed and necessary for salvation; still others were consequent, derived from the
antecedent and constitutive doctrines. Constitutive doctrines he described as fundamental,
and derivative as nonfundamental. With this distinction in place, he thought there could
be a peaceful fellowship of faith between Calvinists, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics on
the basis of a patristic consensus on fundamental articles of the faith as found distilled
in the Apostles Creed, the so-called consensus quinquesaecularis (the consensus of the
first five centuries). The tradition of the first five centuries was the standard by which what
was necessary for salvation could be distinguished from subsequent developments and
nonfundamental derivations (Böttigheimer 2003). Though he inspired Gottfried Wilhelm
Liebniz in his later quest to provide theological grounds for ecclesial reunion on the basis
of a substance metaphysics capable of reframing confessional differences surrounding
the holy supper (Edel 2000), the Helmstedter found an indefatigable opponent in Abraham
Calov of the University of Wittenberg. Not only did Calov reject the distinction of the
relative importance of doctrines, he saw contention in the fathers and did not recognize
consensus as a marker of the truth. Further, it was clear to Calov that Calixt’s system
placed the doctrine of justification, by which Calov understood the church to stand or fall,
in the category of nonfundamental doctrines developed after the first five centuries. This
seemed a blatant affront to the heart of the Lutheran reformation. Calov and Calixt were
the leading figures of the Syncretist Controversy, which began after Calixt participated in
the Colloquy of Thorn in 1645. This eventually led Calov, who thought true doctrine to grow
as an organic whole, to compose his Consensus Repetitus Fidei Vere Lutheranae (The
Repeated Consensus of the True Lutheran Faith), in which he claimed that the Lutheran
Church was the true church of Jesus Christ. Johannes Musäus, multi-term rector of the
University of Jena, took something of a mediating position in the controversy. He shared
Calov’s conviction about the danger of sorting doctrines into the categories proposed by
Calixt, and although he was quite sanguine about what degree of consensus could be
reached on a patristic foundation, he did think that the consensus of the fathers – so far
as it existed – could serve as a valuable starting point for dialogue. On the other hand,
he opposed Calov’s Consensus Repetitus as an undue expansion of ecclesial doctrine
on the basis of theological opinion even as he opposed Calixt’s notion that the Apostles
Creed functioned as a summation of all material necessary to the Christian faith. Instead
of subtraction or addition, the Lutheran confessions of the sixteenth century marked

16
out the parameters of the true Lutheran faith. Whereas Calixt seems to have found the
church catholic in the first five centuries – especially represented by the church’s ancient
patriarchates – and Calov identified it with the Lutheran church, Musäus made a distinction
between visible and invisible central to his presentation, loosing the internal and invisible
essence of the church from its external form (Albrecht 2000). In this sense the church,
properly speaking, was by definition one, and external union was possible only under
agreement on all articles of the faith.

Cognizant of their place within a Lutheran type of church in a now divided Western
Christendom, Lutheran theologians went about their perennial task of expositing the
doctrine of sacred scripture. The theologians of the period of Lutheran orthodoxy
presented the church as a body (the body of Christ), as a bride, and as the house of God
(Gerhard 2010: §17, §18, §21). Although many still insisted on the church’s visibility (cf.
König 1664: §1026), ecclesiologies of the period adopted visibility and invisibility as a
structural principle for assessing and presenting the church. The true version of church
could be diagnosed by its presentation of the most orthodox doctrine. Though theologians
continued to speak of about the word and the sacraments as organs or instruments of
salvation (König 1664: §1019), Lutheran Orthodoxy shifted emphasis from the preached
word that effected faith to the scriptures as the foundation for right faith and pure doctrine.
The holy scriptures became a sort of prolegomenon in the era of Lutheran Orthodoxy,
which witnessed the unfolding of the doctrine of scripture’s inspiration and presented the
Bible as the formal principle of theology. Building out a category taken from Melanchthon,
the orthodox dogmaticians could speak of ‘the church strictly speaking’ (ecclesia stricte
dicta) and ‘the church loosely speaking’ (ecclesia late dicta), tying the former to the
invisible multitude of the elect and the latter to the visible assembly of the called (Kühn
1989: 265). They thereby accorded a certain priority to the invisible. Over against Luther’s
understanding of the three estates, a significant theological shift took place as the civil
estate and the domestic-economic estate ceased to operate as hierarchies or estates
next to the church and were instead placed inside of it. The magistrate was, therewith,
accorded care for the Christian religion (cura religionis) in his territories, and the civil
authority had the right and bore responsibility of the outward ordering of the church
(ius circa sacra), even if it eventually came to be somewhat distanced from the spiritual
oversight of the church in matters of faith and worship (ius in sacra).

Pietism and Enlightenment rationalism were in part responses to Lutheran Orthodoxy.

Its scrutiny of the rectitude of faith paved the way Pietism’s inward turn. Philipp Jacob
Spener, herald of subsequent efforts toward a German Protestant union (Hirsch 1949:
127–138 [vol. II]), called attention to the elements of faith and life that Lutherans shared
with the Reformed, over against Roman Catholics. In Herrnhut, the Pietism of Nikolaus
Ludwig, Reichsgraf von Zinzendorf melded with the ecclesiology of Moravian refugees
as their ‘congregation of brothers’ (Brüdergemeinde) undertook influential and expansive

17
mission work that operated beyond confessional differences. Pietism, which shared with
the Enlightenment a preference for the invisible church, made ecclesiology ‘pragmatic
to the point of functionalism’ (Tjørhom 2016: 334) and ranked visible manifestations of
the church as secondary to the invisible nature of the true or little church. Its proponents
and adherents were more concerned with the appropriation of salvation than its
ad-ministration; its obligation to a very detailed order of salvation both internalized
and anthropologised a salvation that had as little need for external mediation as the
Enlightenment had place for outward means of grace in religion.

Like the Pietists, rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment were also sceptical of
Orthodoxy’s identification of salvation with doctrine. Johann Salomo Semler appropriated
the categories of visibility and invisibility to call attention to the distinction between theology
and religion, influencing Immanuel Kant in his assertion that only the weak needed the
doctrines and ordinances of the church for religion. Kant saw the church as a vehicle
for the religious faith of free individuals, which itself could pass away with its laws and
dogmas. Both Spener and Semler lent the doctrine of the common priesthood of Christians
(1 Pet 2:9) new weight. Consequentially, the reformers’ fundamental conviction about
the primacy of the external to the internal did not readily survive the Enlightenment’s
placement of religion with the abstract and intangible, nor Pietism’s personalising and strict
subjectivising of human beings’ relationship to God.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Friedrich Julius Stahl aligned Orthodoxy, Pietism, and
Rationalism with three successive theories of church polity (1840: 5–46). Lutheran
Orthodoxy maintained a certain episcopalism, presenting the head of state as the
standing, emergency head of a region’s church, which still enjoyed some institutional
independence within the state. Pietism’s internalization of ecclesiology was able to pair
with a territorialist understanding of church, wherein the head of state’s authority over
the institutional church needed no justification via an episcopal byway. The Rationalists
espoused a collegial system of polity, in which the sovereignty of the people itself was
accorded sovereignty over the church.

4.2 The long nineteenth century

The long nineteenth century, stretching from the French Revolution to the First World
War and including such events as the Napoleonic Wars, the revolutions of 1848, and the
Franco-Prussian War, was a period of upheaval for Lutheran churches in Lutheran states.
By the turn of the century Romanticism and awakening movements had begun to move
ecclesiological sentiments in new directions, with internality of experience sometimes
fusing with a renewed appreciation for tradition.

The Danish Church, oft subject of Søren Kirekegaard’s reproofs, was shaped in a
congregational direction by its Pietist Inner Mission, albeit with fresh affinity for an older

18
Lutheran orthodoxy as promulgated by Klaus Harms of neighbouring Schleswig-Holstein.
N. F. S. Gruntvig and the Gruntvigians constituted a uniquely Danish reform movement,
which discovered in the liturgy and in the Apostles’ Creed substantial moments of
continuity for the faith and life of the church. The Danish focus on mission was shared in
Norway, albeit from a more individual direction, while Christianity in Sweden was still that
of the Swedish Lutheran Church, characterized by centralized state control. After Sweden
lost the eastern portion of its territories to Russia in 1809, ecclesial life in the new Grand
Dutchy of Finland was shaped by both the Lutheran and the Russian Orthodox Churches.
During this period, the Nordic countries took first steps in a more pluralistic direction,
tolerating other denominations and religious groups and allowing conversion, albeit with
the Lutheran confessions still as recognized standards of the official churches.

In Germany, F. D. E. Schleiermacher sought to keep individual piety tied to the institutional

church. In his synthesis of Pietist and Enlightenment impulses, the church emerged
as a creature of faith (Tjørhom 2016), the social form of religion that followed faith.
Schleiermacher also offered theological support to Prussian efforts to unite German
Protestants in a single church. Echoing Spener’s sentiments, he asserted a consequential
ecclesiological principle: ‘[Protestantism] makes the individual’s relation to the Church
dependent on his relation to Christ, while [Catholicism …] makes the individual’s relation to
Christ dependent on his relation to the Church’ (Schleiermacher 1989: §24).

Adjacent to feeling and piety, the category of experience played a significant role in
Schleiermacher’s theological program. This particular facet of his theology was taken
up in Erlangen, which came to be the centre of a Lutheran confessional revival in
Germany, which – contrary to Schleiermacher – opposed the Prussian Union. The
Lutheran confessional revival, fuelled in part by the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, was
very much an ecclesiological revival. Confronted by ‘a church that want[ed] to know
nothing of Protestantism and a Protestantism that want[ed] to know nothing of the
church’ (Harleß 1838: 2), the Erlangers turned to the Lutheran confessions as documents
with legal standing in their church, presenting them as tried and true testimonies to right,
collective experience of the faith as it had unfolded in an organic fashion. One challenge
posed by Schleiermacher’s influential legacy was the integration of the means of grace
into a revitalized understanding of the church. For three centuries since the Lutheran
Reformation the word had been preached, people had been baptized, and the supper
had been celebrated in Lutheran territories, but as Lutherans of the nineteenth century
scrutinized ecclesiology, it was unclear whether the church was responsible for these
phenomena, or whether they were responsible for the church. Even within Germany’s neo-
Lutheran revival opinions were mixed. In Erlangen J. W. F. Höfling struggled to integrate
the sacraments into his ecclesiological system, and Adolf von Harleß described them
signs of the church’s existence by which the church assembled itself. Theodor Kliefoth,
superintendent of Schwerin and president of its high consistory, on the other hand,

19
asserted that God generated, assembled, and maintained the church through the means
of grace while also ordering the church (Kliefoth 1854; cf. Grundtvig 1976: 62). F. J. Stahl
of Berlin and A. F. C. Vilmar of Hesse insisted that particular persons, i.e. ministers, were
an indissoluble facet of this divine ordering.

Höfling, who set the main direction for Erlangen’s ecclesiology, accepted Schleiermacher’s
Protestant principle and took the invisible church, whose existence was simply a given
(Brunner 1962: 238 note 3), as his ecclesiological starting point. Operating under what
he considered the "proper Protestant perspective" of the church as an essentially inner
and spiritual fellowship (Fagerberg 1952: 233), all matters of institution were presented as
necessarily secondary. Careful to avoid anything with an air of Roman Catholicism, Höfling
strictly separated ecclesial ministry from the governance of the church and categorized all
external matters of the church’s life under the necessarily secondary heading of the law,
including liturgical matters of ‘ceremonial law’. Significantly, he presented the ecclesial
ministry as a derivation of the general priesthood of believers, which delegated certain
functions to it.

Some who were associated with the confessional revival did not, however, follow
Erlangen’s dominant ministeriology, including Erlangen’s own Franz Delitzsch. Along with
Stahl and Vilmar, Wilhelm Löhe of Neuendettelsau presented more institutional visions of
the church, in which external facets of ecclesial life were prized as part and parcel of its
sacramentally fed existence and historical-continuous character. Underscoring the word
and sacraments as means of grace, they understood the ecclesial ministry, which Theodor
Kliefoth described as "the means-of-grace office" (1854: 132–231), to be founded in a
particular institution of Christ and passed on by ordination. Stahl stressed the priority of the
Christ’s lordship in the church as an institution by way of the word, the sacraments, and
the ministry – Christ’s instruments – to Christ’s lordship in souls – his abode. Thus, by the
middle of the nineteenth century, theological sentiments about the church as an institution
could move in wildly different directions even within the Germany’s confessional revival.

In the political upheavals that were reordering the states and governmental systems in
which they lived – or in the lands of their emigration, where they lacked state ecclesial
structures altogether – Lutherans of the nineteenth century sought new connections to one
another in theological federations, such as the General Evangelical Lutheran Conference
of Germany (1868) and the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America
(1872).

Somewhat opposite the Neo-Lutheran confessional revival, Neo-Protestantism unfolded

in the direction of cultural Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus) in the latter decades of
the century. Under the influence of Kant, the pro me (for me) element of the gospel had
become the a priori assumption of a transcendental ‘I’ (Bayer 1994: 107–108). Immediacy,

20
including an unmediated relationship to God, was assumed. Hegel took the abolition of
externality as a basic principle of the Reformation. Ecclesiologically, this transcendental
‘I’ had an ecclesiological counterpart in the transcendental ‘We’ of the general priesthood
of all believers. Believers simply existed, and – as believers – their direct access to God
was to be taken as the starting point of ecclesiology. This trajectory, which appropriated
Schleiermacher’s alignment of internal sense and feeling with consciousness of God
had a marked impact on the Lutheran tradition. A primacy is clearly accorded to the
internal in ecclesiological reasoning; nothing can rightly be predicated about the church
that does not pass through the internality of faith. If the starting point of ecclesiological
reasoning is an undifferentiated immediacy of relation to God in faith, and if the word
of God is the gospel first in being subjectively appropriated as such, then the entire
external edifice of the church and the ministry as an institution qua edifice and institution
are simply necessary matters of the law. Binding the divine to the internal generates
ecclesiological repercussions. External matters of the church’s institutional life were
necessarily secondary. Trutz Rendtorff has shown how a given appropriation of the
doctrine of justification, with inherent elements of internality, has led to the indefiniteness
and indecisiveness of folk-church structures lest external, ‘human’ orders somehow
be related to salvation (1970). Georg Rietschel operated with these Neo-Protestant
underpinnings in his liturgics: the liturgy, including the rite of ordination, pedagogically
taught what was already the case. Similarly, Rudolph Sohm’s treatment of ecclesiastical
law neatly quarantined all matters of church law and ecclesial organization from questions
that could be considered properly theological. Cultural Protestantism operated with a kind
of ontological dualism (Kinder 1964: 59–60). With the church as a given, a subjective
reality essentially unmoored from external or historical causation, the proponents of
cultural Protestantism could focus their attention on its effects, indicating how it leavened
the whole culture and connected it to a Christian religious foundation. Toward the long
century’s end, the heirs of the awakenings and the confessional revival protested that
‘evangelisch’ (Protestant/evangelical) did not stand for ‘a generic, undifferentiated,
Rome-free, dogma-free, universal Protestantism’ (Kinder 1955: 280). Nevertheless, at
least in Germany, the passing of theological verdict on radically divergent streams of
ecclesiology was overtaken by events leading to the establishment of the German Empire
and eventually to the collapse of the Landesherrlichen Kirchenregiment in 1918.

4.3 Recent and contemporary

Lutheran ecclesiology since the First World War has been shaped by new stages in
the relationship between church and state, by the formation of international Lutheran
federations, and by the ecumenical movement.

In the twentieth century the Lutheran monocultures of the Nordic lands became more
permeable, in part due to a general secularizing tendency operative in these societies.

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Governmental control of state churches and former state churches loosened, but with
the Lutheran churches enjoying a recognized majority status as peoples’ churches
(Volkskirchen). At the same time the ecclesiology of Einar Billing helped lay a foundation
for the welfare states of Sweden and Denmark, a replacement for an earlier concept of
oeconomia as a familial-economic hierarchy or estate established by God. In Germany
Lutheran ecclesiology had to confront the National Socialists’ attempt to co-opt the unified
German Evangelical Church for its purposes; the leading resistance was mounted by the
Confessing Church, itself a pan-Protestant institution, whose Barmen Declaration would
shape ecclesiological convictions downstream by declaring that ’The Christian Church
is the congregation of brothers in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord in Word
and Sacrament through the Holy Spirit’ (Barmen 3; Rabinbach and Gilman 2013: §188).
The Lutheran ecclesiologies of emigrant communities and foreign missions developed
in countries that allowed religious freedom without offering Lutheran churches favoured
status.

In 1923 the Lutheran World Convention met for the first time. It was replaced in 1947
by the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), the largest Lutheran body in the world. The
smaller International Lutheran Council (ILC) and the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran
Conference (CELC) were founded in 1993.

Nathan Söderblom, archbishop of Uppsala, who was instrumental in bringing together

the Lutheran World Convention, was also a Lutheran pioneer in the ecumenical
movement. He suggested a model for ecumenical interaction based on Schleiermacher’s
apologetics, which flipped an older controversialist tendency by encouraging interlocutors
to understand each other’s traditions. Lutheran ecumenical dialogues, which have
taken place on both national and international levels, have led to greater understanding
with the Reformed, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, and Christians of other
traditions, sometimes resulting in declarations of fellowship. As a result of such ecumenical
engagement, Lutheran ecclesiology today faces a question about what social shape the
church’s life may take, such that the particularities of a given confession be maintained as
growth in communion with other churches is recognized (Schwöbel 2002).

In addition these historical developments, Lutherans of the last century have continued
to produce theologies of the church that sought to address questions about the church’s
nature and visibility, about the relationship of faith to the word and sacraments, and about
the ministry.

In some contemporary efforts it has been common to put the preached word and the
administered sacraments out in front of the faith by which the church is defined, while
simultaneously describing preaching as the voice of the church and the sacraments
as its actions (Skydsgaard 1963: 18, 39). Which comes first, faith or the means of

22
grace? One approach to this puzzle is to treat all mediation of the gospel as a word-
based type of communication, such that the gospel is proclaimed "in the word and the
sacrament" (Schwöbel 2002: 386). Not only does such a description place the activity
under which the gospel is being considered in the vocabular orbit of 1 Pet 2:9, the
only instance of exaggellō (to proclaim or sound forth) in the New Testament and the
classic text for the general priesthood of believers, it treats the word and sacrament[s]
as activities of the church seen as a fellowship of collective witness. The event of the
gospel’s proclamation presumes the ecclesial fellowship that makes it possible, such
that the church simultaneously acts as the instrument of the gospel and is created by the
gospel, with human cooperation written as a law into both the origin and maintenance
of the church (Herms 2010: xvi–xvii, 39). In a sense, this approach revisits the issue
of visibility and invisibility from another angle: the clearly visible collective fellowship
gathered around the word and sacraments sees to its preaching and their administration,
whose gospel goes before the more nearly invisible faith of individuals. The visible church
is then presented as the means for the communication of the gospel, which – insofar
as it fulfils its task of ministry – brings the invisible church into existence and sustains
it (Härle 2015: 468, 471–72). Another approach, affirming the church as a creature of
the gospel and recognizing the word of God as the holiest of all holy things (cf. LC Ten
Commandments: 91; [CPCE] 2018: 399), honours the sacraments alongside the preached
word as particular confrontations with the judgment and grace of God (Kinder 1961), which
as ministerially delivered realities are what they are apart from any collective or individual
reception of faith, such that the gospel externally delivered opposite the law creates both
faith and the church (Kinder 1957: 137). Thus, while acknowledging that the church is not
immediately available to visual sense perception (unsichtlich), the category of invisibility
(Unsichtbarkeit) can simply be abandoned. Nevertheless, based on certain indicators of its
hidden and revealed presence, which themselves are available to sense perception, the
church is recognizable (Kinder 1958: 173–174).

As modern developments in the theological presentation of the word and sacraments

are noted, a shift in Lutherans sentiments about ecclesiological reasoning out from the
sacred scriptures is also required. A major shift in Lutheran theology had been transpiring
since the Enlightenment’s historical-critical scrutiny of biblical texts led to the undermining
of the previously untouchable foundation of Lutheran Orthodoxy’s theological program.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, this shift was clearly being felt in the rank and file
of the church. By the middle of the twentieth century, critical engagement with scripture
resulted in least two important ecclesiological changes. First, many theologians had
begun working de facto with a more authoritative canon within the canon of the New
Testament – more specifically, a real Pauline canon distinct from the ‘deutero-’ or ‘pseudo-
Pauline’ epistles (Prenter 1967: 524). This led to the theological prioritization of a more
charismatic picture of the church, underwritten by Romans and 1 Corinthians, over the

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more structured ecclesial pictures, presented by Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral
Epistles. Accordingly, their more institutional facets are judged later accretions to the real
apostolic model. Second, the gospels themselves are often not read as the reformers
would have read them, namely as direct and clear presentations of the words and actions
of Jesus, but at least in part as competing visions of the communities in and out of which
they arose (Schnelle 2009). Ecclesiologically, these methodological shifts tend to place
communities witnessing to Christ out in front of authoritative texts as such, and they assign
matters of institution and structure a necessarily secondary – i.e. non-apostolic and non-
divine – status.

It is almost impossible to find a Lutheran theologian who does not wave the flag of his or
her tradition’s esteem of holy scripture in some high fashion, but, taken across its five-
century history as a whole, Lutherans’ ecclesiological engagement with the holy scriptures
operates in divergent directions. Some have taken the church and the apostolic ministry
to be direct institutions of Christ, attested by the Gospels, and the structures and offices of
the broader Pauline corpus to be of apostolic origin and thus of dominical weight. Others
have sought to be guided by the witnessing communities behind the Gospels and Acts,
themselves outgrowths of the Jerusalem community’s encounter with Christ, and by a pre-
institutional and charismatic vision of the church taken from the narrower Pauline canon.
And between these loosely described poles a spectrum of opinion also exists.

There is perhaps no greater matter of inner-Lutheran ecclesiological dissent than

Lutherans’ differing understandings of ministry – or the ministry – and how this relates
to the Christian congregation. As Wolfhart Pannenberg observed, inner-Lutheran
disagreement surrounding this structural category can impinge on Lutherans’ ability to
engage in ecumenical dialogue (1990: 287–288). Though all espouse a divine institution
of the ecclesial ministry, some understand the particular or special ministry of those who
bear it as their specific or professional office to be derived from and a necessarily ordered
form of the general ministry of all believers’ priesthood. Accordingly, ministry is the job of
the whole church; it is actuation of the life of this fellowship of faith, a duty all Christians
share as soon as they share in the life of the congregation. Any who minister in a special
way, do so as those called to it by, in the name of, and on behalf of all (Herms 2010:
xxvi, 54). Along this trajectory ordination is often understood as a liturgical recognition of
such a calling and/or as a ritualized conferral of rights and duties from the congregation,
but not itself as an essential blessing or capacitation to the ministry of preaching and
administering the sacraments (Härle 2015: 477); episcopacy is most often viewed as
a function, for which competency is attained through education. Professional ministers
do what all Christians do; the difference between them and other Christians is one of
theological competency and degree of public engagement, but not one of essence. This
ministeriological trajectory takes CA V to be speaking of ministry in general, and not
the ministry of particular people; preaching and administration of the sacraments are

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understood as functions not tethered to persons. However, it has also been noted that
there is no preached word and no administrated sacraments without the persons who
preach and administer (Brunner 1962: 245 note 11). So, along a rather different trajectory,
the ministry is not general but particular and tied to persons. In this vein most credit the
ministry to Christ’s call and commissioning of the apostles. This apostolic office, from
the beginning wed to particular persons, is then most often understood to pass from
those who already bear it to others in ordination, an act entailing at least prayer and the
laying on of hands and understood as a real benediction (Giertz and Andrae 2010: 157–
169; Heubach 1956). The notion of succession is overt. However, given the Lutheran
appropriation of an earlier medieval position, which held that the clergy presiding over
parishes and those who oversee dioceses belong by divine right to the same order (Tr
60–65; [CPCE] 2018: 340; Ott 1969: 19–25, 40–48, 78–87; Wendebourg 2000: 197–205),
this succession must be distinguished from a subsequent understanding of ‘apostolic
succession’ (Kretschmar 1995; Piepkorn 1970). Along this trajectory the difference
between ministers and congregation can, with qualification, be described as essential –
not a difference pertaining to their salvation or individual sanctity – but to their office in
the church. On a historical level, the aforementioned trajectories mirror to a considerable
degree positions in a debate that eventually split Germany’s nineteenth-century Lutheran
revival, whose participants variously accusing one another of Romanist and Reformed
importations into Lutheran ecclesiology (Fagerberg 1952: 101–120, 271–312; Mumme
2024).

Lutherans agree that the ministry operates within and not apart from the congregation. A
question exists as to whether the ministry and ministers also stand opposite (gegenüber)
the assembly of believers as something other than a necessary instance of social order
and a pool of theologically educated persons modelling and directing the work that all
Christians are to do. Are they representatives of Christ to the church and thereby capable
of confronting sinners with divine judgment and of proclaiming the gospel as a message
whose merciful veracity simply stands – apart from the internal sentiments of a given soul
or souls – and therefore can be preached to those in need of but not themselves capable
of salvation? This case can be adjudicated by asking what kind of religion supports or fails
the presence of the gospel as the gospel (Baur 1980: 106–107).

As Lutheran ecclesiological efforts of the last hundred years have taken up theological
pairings that date at least as far back as the Reformation these remain productive. And
in the contemporary flowering, as at the historical root, the diagnostic of internality and
externality merits application. If it is true that the church is a communion, and that this
communion is not constituted through itself, but from outside itself (Schwöbel 2002: 409),
then the claim that the church is a creature of the gospel in the same way that it is an
instrument of the gospel, necessarily involved in a permanent process of cooperative
self–realization (Herms 2010: xxviii, 45), may actually constitute a contradiction the most

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basic principles of the Lutheran reformers’ soteriology, albeit on the collective level of the
community. The attentions more recently afforded to speech, language, ritual, history,
liturgy, and tradition by theology, philosophy, and the social sciences – a fresh "praise of
externality" (Wannenwetsch 2009) – point in the direction of a reappraisal of this somewhat
lost but potently latent factor at the foundation of Lutheran ecclesiology.

4.4 Polities and particular ecclesial trajectories

Though Lutheranism now extends throughout the world, its oldest historical centres are
Germany and the Nordic countries, along with the Baltics. These, along with the United
States, have thus far yielded the most in the way of ecclesiology. Though one cannot
cleanly mark out a German form of Lutheran ecclesiology that is entirely distinct from
a Nordic form, given emphases of a German trajectory that distinguish it from a Nordic
trajectory – especially that of Sweden and Finland – can be discerned. These trajectories
relate to the structure of the church and ecclesial polities as they have operated in these
lands. American Lutheran ecclesiology, which draws on Nordic and German tradition while
responding to the American religious landscape, has been both productive and rather
polarized.

The life, structure, governance, and polity of Lutheran churches has been shaped,
on the one hand, by the spectrum of convictions playing through the aforementioned
structural categories, and also by the shifting political landscape and theories of the last
five centuries. For most of the twentieth century, it was common to claim that the church
can thrive either as a state church or as a free church (Prenter 1967: 515). Some have
claimed that though there must be a polity, no particular polity may lay claim to be the
proper structuring of the church’s governance and ordered life together (Höfling 1851:
16–19). Other voices, such as those associated with the Princeton Proposal for Christian
Unity, have contended that it is mistaken to see polity as theologically indifferent, and
that facets of a given polity are indispensable for a doctrinally integrated life of the church
(Yeago 2000, 2004). The various positions relate to the facts that Lutherans have variously
lived in ecclesial structures overseen by bishops, tied to given states, or as free churches,
and that Lutheran churches today are often an amalgam of what were once more clearly
distinguishable types.

4.4.1 Germany

A German trajectory of Lutheran ecclesiology seeks to elevate Luther’s insight that the
church is a creature of the word to its organizing structural principal. Often combining
this dictum from the era of the Lutheran reformation with more modern observations from
the philosophy of language and/or with sociological conclusions about the nature and
requirements of communication, a logic of the church is presented, in which the church
answers for communication of the gospel, which gives rise to faith. Everything from the

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understanding of the church’s foundation, to that of its task or mission, and to that of its
shape or structure is worked out from and mustered for the communication of the word
of the gospel (Kühn 1980: 135; [CPCE] 2018: Inro, 4). According to this presentation,
the church is an event; the church happens on the basis of a word event and is itself
such an event (Kühn 1980: 169). The church’s foundation is the christological word event
under which God has taken action to save humankind; it is the task of the church to
witness to this word, and the church takes what form or structure maximally allows for
orchestration of such witnessing ([CPCE] 2018: Intro, 4). As Ulrich Kühn presents the
matter in the German Protestant Handbuch systemtatischer Theologie (Handbook of
Systematic Theology), the church’s foundation is and must be Jesus Christ. Since no
founding of the church can, however, be established in a historical relation to the historical
Jesus, the theological heirs of the Lutheran Reformation must follow its humanist biblical-
humanist underpinnings by getting back to the earliest sources they can reach. Today
this means utilizing historical-critical methodology and the insights of current exegesis to
arrive at conclusions about what lies behind the texts of the New Testament. According
to this scholarship, Jesus instituted neither baptism nor the eucharist, and he did not
found what Christians now know as the church. This insurmountable distance between
the church and the historical Jesus is theologically quarantined by the claim that Jesus
remains the perpetually present foundation of the church in proclamation that takes place
now; the relation of the church to Christ is perpetually established in the present. Not
only is the church a creature of the gospel, it is responsible for the ‘witness[ing] … to’
the gospel ([CPCE] 2018: Intro 4 et passim); this claim about the church’s duty or task
overlays with concepts of ‘mission’ and ‘sending’. Because of the coincidence of church
and society in the West at their time, ‘the Reformers’ did not have the missionary task of
the church ‘in view at all’ (Kühn 1980: 151). Especially in the face increasing challenges
in secularist, pluralist, and post-Christian societies the church must take its collective task
of witness – which involves each and every Christian – seriously, such that the church
as a fellowship of witness and service be encounterable as credible presence of Christ
in the world, a messianic people of the coming kingdom. Not least because nothing in
the church can be traced to the historical Jesus, and all structurings of the church are the
result of subsequent historical development, the church has no form or structure that can
claim the status of a divine institution. Questions about ministry and polity today can then
be answered in manner pragmatic oriented to the communication of the word. Ecclesial
tradition may be appropriated as information as the church today structures its polity and
collective responsibility for ministry along democratic lines. Public or ordained ministry gets
worked out as a kind of social and practical matter, required for the orchestration of public
worship and other instances of witness, which always remain the purview of the whole
community and the joint responsibility of each individual Christian. In this way the church
comes to be the sort of institution that it is, and even sociologists recognize that institution

27
is needed for event: "First because the church as institution is present, can the church
become as event" (Kühn 1980: 169).

This German trajectory evinces the following theological challenges. First, its concept of
‘the word’ is nebulous. There is clearly a proper desire to christologically stipulate this
notion, but as ‘the word’ passes into the present it comes to be a message of or about
Jesus Christ cast along somewhat refreshed lines of the doctrine of justification. What is
unclear is how this ‘word’ is a word – how it is spoken and communicated – by any agent
but the church itself. Second, then, is the challenge of CA V, which presents the faith- and
church-creating word of the gospel as an ‘external’ and embodied word, a word that is
antecedent to faith. There is, however, no word antecedent to faith when all word-eventing
takes place by means of the believing community’s witness. There is no word outside the
church by which the church is being created and sustained. Third, this German trajectory
can attempt to present its logic of church as word-event along the lines of or somewhat
analogous to the doctrine of justification by faith alone, which faith comes by hearing (Rom
10:17). This becomes particularly ironic when assertions, which if read soteriologically
contradict the doctrine of justification, are without further ado made about church as the
communal instantiation and instantiator of Christ’s work and presence todaytoday ‘The
church shares in the messianic work of Jesus Christ’ (Kühn 1980: 153); as ostensible
creature of the word, the church is ‘the fellowship that springs from the living witness of
the gospel’, as ‘people … witness to the gospel and celebrate the sacraments’, such that
‘[b]y this means the Holy Spirit gathers and builds the church as the community of the
faithful’ ([CPCE] 2018: 1.1 and 1.3); likewise, the gospel by which God saves, on the level
of the communication without which it is not the gospel, is simultaneously a responsibility
to be fulfilled: ‘God’s justifying action … requires’ independent and free human action,
including ‘witnessing to the gospel of Jesus Christ’, right down to the co-structuring of
the witnessing community ([CPCE] 2018: 1.4). God saves by communication; there is
no communication of the saving gospel today but that which is carried out by the church;
the church as collective agent necessarily contributes to salvation by witnessing, and
each and every believer bears joint responsibility for witnessing; so, each and every
believer and the church collective bears responsibility for a salvation that is also their
own – therein lies a major challenge for a soteriology that claims salvation by grace alone
without contribution of human activity. A final challenge lies in the a-historicity of this
trajectory, which by overtly staking everything on a present word-event and the continued
ecclesial instantiation of that event neatly avoids giving theological answer for the historical
continuity of the church. Interestingly, this a-historicity of the present word-event pairs
with a tendency to use ‘Reformation’ as an adjective ([CPCE] 2018: passim). Historical
scholars of that period must not only specify what they mean by ‘the Reformation’ and
often speak of ‘reformations’, but this trajectory’s adjectival use of the term hegemonically
elides significant differences of that period and appears to elevate ‘Reformation’ to the

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level of understood sentiment under which theology can be done in relation to a ‘word’ that
need not be pressed for a definition.

It is perhaps understandable that the history of the church’s form and structure be avoided
as a systematically relevant set of categories when that history has experienced a
turbulence that resists systematization. The Lutheran churches in German territories, with
their superintendents and related ecclesial structures, lived in given states and operated
under the heads of those states. In Germany’s case, medieval diocesan structures did
not remain nearly so intact as in the Nordic countries, and the head of the state was the
ruling authority of the given church. Over the course of time different political theories –
episcopalism, territorialism, collegialism – variously underwrote how German Lutherans
understood the highest political authority of their lands as the governing authority over their
churches. Before the war that ended the landesherrliche Kirchenregiment, most of these
churches operated with a consistorial polity, with a council or consistory of church officials
overseeing the church under the authority of the state. More recently there has been a
gradual movement toward folk churches, even where the church is associated with a given
state of the Germany’s federal republic.

4.4.2 Nordic countries

A somewhat different sentiment has imbued ecclesiology in the Nordic countries, at

least so far as Sweden and Finland are concerned, where the Lutheran church is
understood and presented as the evangelical tradition of the one church. Eero Huovinen
expresses this posture when he underscores the historical continuity of the Christian
faith as a hallmark of its veracity in any place. ‘The dogma of the Christian Church is
seen as an integral part of the tradition beginning with the Apostles, running down like
a powerful stream through history’ (2009: 277). Ecclesiology in this trajectory operates
with a historical continuity that ties the church as it exists among Lutherans to its
classical heritage and thereby lays historical claim to the church’s catholicity. Thus, Bo
Giertz claimed, ‘there has never been more than one church in Sweden’, while Nathan
Söderblom asserted, ‘The catholic church in Sweden, that’s [us]’ (Giertz and Andrae 2010:
80, 83). Although event-level interaction with God is not denied, especially in view of the
liturgy and worship (Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue Commission for Finland 2017: 33), the
church is also a more permanently localized entity. The given parish church, a reflection
of the heavenly city and permanent eschatological symbol, stands as a local instance
of a chain or web of localities spread throughout the land and to the ends of the world;
to this locality Christ descends such that this holy place allows access to heaven itself
(Giertz and Andrae 2010: 3–5, 93–95). That such a place exists owes to the existence
of the church before any Christian today and before the given local congregation (Giertz
and Andrae 2010: 15). As this trajectory considers the church’s foundation, it points to
the apostles’ commissioning by Christ, which authored an apostolic form of authority

29
that then passed to their chosen successors, with the offices of the church organically
emerging from the transferable authority of the apostolate (Giertz and Andrae 2010: 42–
44, 84, 155). A notion of apostolic-ministerial succession is part and parcel of the sense
of historical continuity that marks out this particular trajectory of Lutheran ecclesiology,
such that an apostolic-ministerial succession of the church’s pastors is meaningful even
when it does not involve an unbroken chain of episcopal consecrations dating to the period
before the Reformation. The apostolic ministry precedes the church in such a way that it
accounts for the church’s coming to a given land, in which place the integrity and veracity
of the church are then wed to this ministry in its congregating primacy, as an instrument
and representative of Jesus Christ that is not only located in but faces the congregation
it gathers on his behalf (Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue Commission for Finland 2017: 194,
202). A viable ecclesiology is inconceivable apart from a historical type of continuity that
presents not only the scriptures, the rule of faith, and a fixed confession but also the
ministerial office in a historically traditive form; all of these belong to agreement in the
gospel (Giertz and Andrae 2010: 156; Huovinen 2009: 299; Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue
Commission for Finland 2017: 11). Two challenges face such a trajectory. First, if ecclesial
entities, as they live in places like Sweden or Finland, wish to claim a continuity with the
one catholic church, then they must account for their history in such a way as makes this
continuity intelligible, from Christ to the present. This seems a challenge that the Swedish-
Finnish trajectory has generally welcomed. Second, if Lutherans, even more than their
Anglican counterparts, prize continuity of faith and doctrine as marks of the church’s true
apostolicity, especially as they live spiritually in liturgical expression (Huovinen 2009: 278),
no new ministerial action may be taken that would be a departure from their church’s
identity as ‘a branch of the catholic church’ (Giertz and Andrae 2010: 83). This, of course,
includes matters of admission to the ministry and the liturgical celebration of weddings in
Sweden and Finland.

The tradition of episcopal polity, which most accurately reflects the reformers’ thoughts
about the constitution of the church (Bornkamm 1966: 212), has lived most strongly
in Nordic Lutheranism. In Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland the older diocesan
structures were, for the most part, maintained, with those overseeing them variously
being referred to as bishops and superintendents. Sweden’s bishops, though appointed
by the monarch, along with their chapters and a fairly intact succession of pastors in
the parishes, were able to resist Gustav Vasa’s wishes for a greater sub-ordering of the
church to his government, thus maintaining greater ecclesial independence over against
the state. Bishops were elected by the clergy until 1965 (Giertz and Andrae 2010: xix).
Later, episcopal candidates came to be chosen by a type of election similar to that of civil
officials, subject to subsequent selection by the government, a state of affairs that left them
largely without canonical power and unable to correct national aberration (Brodd 1993:
69). The Nordic countries have also undergone shifts in the direction of folk churches. On

30
an official level, the Church of Sweden ceased to be a state church in 2000, as did the
church of Norway in 2012. The supreme ruling body Danish church, which considers itself
a folk church supported by the state, is parliament and the monarch.

4.4.3 America

The historically pluriform religious landscape of America makes it more difficult to identify
an American trajectory of Lutheran ecclesiology. A key difference to Nordic and German
trajectories lies in the fact that American Lutherans, like all American Christians, have
no national history as a state or folk church. This is not to say, however, that they do not
face challenges and questions that are in part shared with their European counterparts.
Even in circles where an appeal to confessional identity can regulate ecclesiological efforts
(Marquardt 1990), pressing ecclesiological questions of the relationship of individuals to
the Christian community, of persons to institutions, and of the particular to the universal
must be faced in a way can account for the growth and deepening of the church’s
confessional insight (Mumme 2019: xi–xvi, 136–43).

The work of the first generation of theologians contributing to Lutherans and Catholics
in Dialogue in the United States was marked by churchliness and erudition. From 1965,
the group was at the forefront of ecumenical theology. In the more recent generation of
the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson stood as
heirs of this ongoing tradition. Their work, along with the journal Pro Ecclesia and the
efforts of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, pointed American Lutheranism
in a traditional and broadly catholic direction. At the same time, Braaten’s piercingly
keen observations about the ecclesial reality of his day, pointed to just how far American
Lutherans might be living from that sort of catholicity. Braaten saw an entity with an
underdeveloped ecclesiology that contributed to a dogmatic deficit which made the
establishing of ecclesial dogma impossible (1998: 27–28, 135–137). Like Jenson, he read
the Reformation as an ecclesial corrective and not as constitutive of a new kind of church
and called for an ecclesiology that proceeded along eschatological lines (1998: 40–66).
Jenson’s Systematic Theology, whose eschatology will be discussed below, mounted
an impressive ecclesiological project marked by lively exchange with Vatican II, various
ecumenical dialogues, and elements of Orthodox pneumatology. Presenting institution
and charism as coordinate categories (1997: 182), Jenson’s most intrepid suggestion is
not only that the church has a polity, but that the church is a polity (1997: 189–201), which
entails a governing, sacramental authority. He presents the essence of the church as
trinitarian, its perichoretic structure as a sacrament of trinitarian koinonia, and its essential
office as a charism of the Spirit conferred in ordination to gather the church and serve
it with an authority that entails pastoral magisterium. The communio-ecclesiology of the
post-conciliar period received a strong reception among catholic-minded evangelicals in
America, who affirmed that the church as a koinonia of salvation entails continuity in the

31
mission, ministry, and message given to the apostles by Jesus (Bishops' Committee for
Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
and the Department for Ecumenical Affairs of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
2005: 75). However, in the ‘life and death struggle for the confessional center’ that was
taking place in all Protestant denominations (Braaten 1998: 9), the ELCA in 1993 rejected
the suggestion of its Department for Ecumenical affairs that the ministerial office also
stood over against the church as a facet of that priority of the word of God that constitutes
the church (Bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Department for Ecumenical Affairs of the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 2005: 62, 224, 236).

Any American trajectory of Lutheran ecclesiology faces at least three challenges. The first
of these was amply indicated by Braaten, namely, how a Lutheran version of church can
live or even survive mainline Protestant dissolution in America with its catholicity intact.
A second and related challenge comes in finding a path between confessional integrity
and confessional insularity preserved in a type of anti-ecumenical parochialism. A third
challenge for Lutheran ecclesiology in America comes in making recognizably valid and
persuasive claims in a religious landscape that neither knows nor has known standards
of orthodoxy, be they Protestant or otherwise. George Lindbeck faced this question in a
general manner in his The Nature of Doctrine (2009) before taking his influential postliberal
project in a specifically ecclesiological direction (2003). Cheryl Peterson’s work attempts
to further Lindbeck’s narrative ecclesiology. Instead of tracing the story of Israel, she
proposes a theology that ‘starts with the Spirit’, by orbiting the narrative of the book of Acts
before flowing into the creed (2013).

Whereas some Nordic churches have now technically become free – albeit nationally
privileged – churches, Lutheran churches in lands where there was no magisterial version
of the Lutheran reformation have always been free churches. Such is the case in America.
Whether these churches’ leading officials are referred to as bishops, presidents, or
chairpersons, they have almost always organized in synodical structures that gradually
worked their way into the lives of their older German and Nordic counterparts. Oftentimes
their ethos and polity have been more congregational – a banding together from the
ground up rather than a stipulation of ecclesial life by civil or ecclesial authorities from
above.

4.4.4 Amalgamations

Although there has been some variety to the shape and structure of Lutheran churches,
political developments since of the middle of the nineteenth century put them in a tighter
orbit than may first appear to be the case. If not already present, synods made their way
into nearly all existing Lutheran churches around the time that representative forms of
government came to shape their states. Today the highest instance of ecclesial authority

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is usually an assembly of church-wide representatives that convenes on a regular basis.
Without contextualization, no assumption can readily be made about what a title such as
‘bishop’ entails. In the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia, for example, where bishops
are consecrated to lifetime service with self-stipulated retirement, the archbishop presides
over the council of bishops that leads the church, the lay and clerical synod that governs
the church, and the synodically elected consistory that sees to ecclesial affairs in the three-
year intervals between synods. Contrast the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America,
whose local bishops and presiding bishop are elected to six-year terms. Its conference
of bishops serves but an advisory role. Between its triennial church-wide assemblies, the
ELCA is governed by a church council elected by that assembly, in which bishops have no
voting role. The United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany (VELKD) is governed by
a general synod, which is constituted every six years, meets annually, and is directed by
an elected presidium of clergy and laity. Its conference of bishops is led by an executive
bishop, who is elected every three years. Both Germans and Americans have questioned
what a traditional title like ‘bishop’ means, if it is emptied of authority (Braaten 1998: 82–
97; Wenz 2004). The Church of Sweden’s bishops are consecrated and serve until a
mandatory age of retirement and lead their cathedral chapters and diocesan boards;
at the same time its general synod is its chief ruling body, with delegates elected every
four years, along with representatives at the diocesan and parish levels. The national
assembly of the Malagasy Lutheran Church convenes every four years and consists of
representatives from its twenty-five regional synods, which each have their own elected
presidents. The synod elects the church-wide officers, which include and president and a
general secretary.

In a somewhat ironic contradiction of CA XXVIII, which was most keen to see ecclesial
authority distinguished from a different type of authority operative in the state, the
governing structure and institutional operations of Lutheran churches (Kirchenregiment)
have most often lived under the very kind of authority operative in the state. At first, that
was the politically instantiated authority that ruled given states; gradually it has become
a representative-democratic form of authority operating through elected assemblies and
term-elected officials. This means that the shape and perhaps the very nature of ecclesial
authority (potestas ecclesiastica/Kirchengewalt) is different than that envisioned by the
Augustana. Today those leading and governing the church represent constituents, whose
desires they must follow – at least in many churches – if they are to remain leaders in
their churches. It is difficult, for example, to conceive of an instance where a ministerially
operative authority of jurisdiction could rebuke and bind public or open sins in such a
system. An exception to this paradoxical but historically observable counteraction lives
to some degree in in ecclesial offices whose incumbents hold their positions for life and
exercise a jurisdictional authority over communion fellowship in their regions of oversight.

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4.5 Lutheran approaches to general ecclesiological concerns
Lutheran ecclesiology has unfolded over the course of five centuries, not in a vacuum,
but alongside the ecclesiological questions of the fractured Western church and with
increasing contact with the churches of the East. Some matters that are or that have
clearly become essential to the task of ecclesiology are not necessarily marked by
Lutheran distinctives, nonetheless they are or have become so germane to questions
about the church that Lutheran ecclesiological efforts naturally address and integrate them.
Three such matters are Israel, eschatology, and the state so far as it relates to the church.
All three of these topics live in a nexus marked out by ecclesiological deliberations about
the people of God and about the kingdom of God.

4.5.1 Israel and eschatology

Prior to the Holocaust and the Second World War supersessionist delineations of the
relationship between Israel and the church were more common. The scriptures were seen
to refer to both an old Israel and a new Israel – an ‘Israel according to the flesh’ (1Cor
10:18) as distinct from ‘the Israel of God’ (Gal 6:16). The church as ‘the true Israel’ was the
proper continuation of the congregation of Israel in the Old Testament, with true Israelites
becoming followers of Christ, as Israel’s destiny came to completion in the resurrection
of Christ, such that the blessing once given to Abraham would thereafter be extended
to all nations (Giertz and Andrae 2010: 8–15). The old covenant of Israel, presented as
combining grace and works, could be viewed as system of self-justification, which – when
clung to in this way – led to the rejection of Christ’s words as God’s word and his vicarious
satisfaction as the full and proper atonement for Israel. Except in coming to stand under
the new covenant of grace, Jews would be monotheists who did not in fact have the true
God and were thus subject to condemnation. Paul’s statement about ‘all Israel’ being
saved (Rom 11:26) was then read as referring to the spiritual Israel, i.e. those elected to
salvation from the people of Israel (Pieper 1953: 527–534).

At least two events of the twentieth century contributed to a reconsideration of the

relationship between Israel and the church: the Holocaust and the Second Vatican
Council’s adoption of a people-of-God ecclesiology. With eschatology having outgrown
its earlier status as a final locus in works of dogmatic theology and having become
a sign under which the entire systematic presentations of the faith could be ordered,
recent Lutheran efforts have recast the relationship of Israel and the church along
an encompassing eschatological trajectory. Wolfhart Pannenberg has asserted that
God’s election aims at a human society whose definitive form is only to be found in the
eschatological fellowship of the kingdom of God (1998b: 463). God elects and operates
in history toward this goal. Any community of the elect existing prior to the unveiling
of this eschatological fellowship regards itself as provisional, a representation of the

34
kingdom of God living in the last days, but certainly distinct from this kingdom. Both Israel
and the church have been elected to bear witness to God’s righteousness among the
nations; as advance representations, both point beyond themselves to the kingdom of
God. Pannenberg notes how Israel’s prophets speak of a new covenant (Jer 31:31–34; cf.
Isa 59:20–21). It is into this covenant that Christ initiates his disciples on the night of his
betrayal (Luke 22:20), such that the church now participates in the new covenant of Israel,
which will be unveiled at Christ’s second coming (1998b: 473–474). There is, according
to Pannenberg, only one people of God, and only on the basis of this new, eschatological
covenant with Israel does the church also lay claim to the title "the people of God" (1998b:
465). Both Israel and the church are being brought forward into this covenant.

The title ‘people of God’, a standard mode of speaking about the church since the
Reformation and adopted by Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium, has had a chequered history.
Over against Lumen Gentium 9 it must be noted that, biblically, there is no reference to a
‘new’ people of God. In fact, the New Testament seldom refers to the church as the people
of God (1 Pet 2:9; Rom 9:23–26); this title is, most often, reserved for Israel. Fathers of
the early church could speak of it as the people of God, but for some the title became
part of a replacement thesis, under which the church took over Israel’s former status in a
manner that now looks to be at odds with Paul’s argument in Romans 11. After Christianity
became the official religion of the empire, the church as ‘people of God’ was eclipsed by
debates surrounding spiritual and secular authority, jurisdiction and hierarchy, until the
Reformation reinvigorated sensibility of for this category, by calling the church ‘a Christian,
holy people’ (Luther 1539; LW 41:148); its adoption by Roman Catholicism and centrality
in modern ecumenical discussions constitutes ‘one of the most important events in modern
discussion of the church’ (Pannenberg 1998a: 470).

Nonetheless, the recognition that the title ‘people of God’ does not belong solely or even
most directly to the church seems to have required some decades of reflection subsequent
to the Holocaust along with the re-examination of Jewish and Christian relations that it
generated. The result has been an eschatological reassessment of categories. Looking at
the church’s past and its present status, it cannot simply be said that the church is – to the
exclusion of Israel – the people of God; looking at the present reality in view of the future,
it also cannot be said that the church is the kingdom of God. Instead, the church is those
who are now being brought into the people of God by communion with Jesus Christ and
thus stand as a sign of the kingdom of God before the second and ultimate advent of its
King.

Robert Jenson adopts an eschatological method similar to Pannenberg, under which

he somewhat more expansively delineates the relationship between the church and
Israel. The church, neither a realization of the new age nor an item of the old, is an event
within the new age’s advent (1997: 171) Espousing what an anticipatory as opposed to

35
a realized eschatology, he notes that the church anticipates but is not itself the kingdom
of God; the kingdom is happening and being established in the church but not such that
this kingdom ceases to be an intrinsically future reality. Similarly, the church, along with
Israel anticipates the one people of God, which cannot be gathered before the last day.
Jenson asserts that Israel and the church have the same God and the same faith (1997:
46–47), but based on specific historical events by which the personal God has revealed
himself to each, namely the exodus and the resurrection. Jenson defuses suppersessionist
and replacement frameworks by indicating how God’s promissory covenants pull forward
through history toward ultimate fulfilment. Israel’s calling by the personal God, enacted
in the exodus, to be a blessing to the nations, is of such a scope that its fulfilment lies
beyond the present age in the new creation (1997: 170). The Lord is still patiently (cf. 2
Pet 3:9) bringing that promise of blessing to fulfilment, and both the church and Judaism
are detours on the way to the goal that is reached with the second coming of Christ, ‘the
paired continuations of Israel’ (1997: 284)

These re-examinations of the church along the lines of an encompassing eschatology offer
some guidance for thinking about Jewish and Christian relations today. The same God has
been at work throughout history and is gathering a single people to welcome and enjoy
the full and final unveiling of his kingdom. The Spirit constitutes ‘the common dynamism of
Israel and the church, impelling Israel to become the church and liberating the church for
the fulfilling of Israel’ (Jenson 1997: 183). This means that Jews today are to be baptized
into the one people of Jews and Gentiles, though not repenting of former life and beliefs in
the same way that Gentiles do. For the church now sacramentally participates in Israel’s
eschatological new covenant; under the form of signs the church enjoys the presence
of the Messiah and has share in his kingdom, which defines the hope of the eschaton.
In contradistinction to darker moments in Christian history, forced conversions are out
of place (Pannenberg 1998a: 475), and in view of God’s faithfulness to his calling, the
continued existence of a separate synagogue cannot be read as contrary to the will of God
(Jenson 1997: 193–194). As Jews and Christians both lay claim to the title ‘people of God’,
they are afforded opportunity to explain how they are such a people and to give an account
of their hope for the coming reign of God.

4.5.2 The church and the state

The gospel that gave rise to the church, and which in every age serves as the source of
its life and substantiates its hope for the future, is a message about the kingdom of God.
It is inevitable that a thing constituted by the message of a gifted kingdom and oriented by
the hope of its full realization must bump into and wrestle with kingdoms as they operate
in this world. The church has always had to examine and come to justifiable terms with its
relationship to what is now usually called ‘the state’. As the sign of the coming kingdom of
God the church is both at odds with and a beacon to all other kingdoms.

36
The Lutheran tradition, along with the mainstream of the Christian tradition, recognizes
that civil authority has been established by God and as such is to be honoured and obeyed
(Rom 13:1–7). At the same time, Christians’ and the church’s fealty to any given state
or set of civil authorities is not absolute (Mark 12:17; Acts 5:29; 1 Pet 2:17), for human
authorities stand under God; though accountable to him, they may act against his will
(Amos 7:10–17), sometimes in apocalyptically fearsome fashion (Rev 13:1–8). So far as
the church and the given state go, there is always a possibility of obedient cooperation or
of conflict, for the church’s expectation of the coming kingdom of God demythologizes all
temporal, earthly rule and accords it only a preliminary status (Lienemann 1989: 399).

Before the advent of Christianity, there was but a single order in which little if any
distinction was drawn between religion and the state or body politic. The coming of the
Christian church made a duality of orders possible, in which a religious society stood
somehow independent of the state (Weber 1999: 502). This distinction led to various two-
part models being proposed to explain this distinction in orders and authority, especially
in the West: Augustine’s two cities, Gelasius I’s two powers, Peter Damian’s two swords.
Lutheranism’s oft vaunted doctrine of the two regiments or ‘kingdoms’ (Gritsch and Jenson
1976) entered the conceptual fray after the late medieval papacy collapsed in part under
the weight of its own claims about the supremacy and originality of spiritual authority under
the pope. Nonetheless, in the Reformation and at least through the Peace of Westphalia
(1648), there remained the notion of a res publica christiana, a Christendom in which
spiritual and secular authority not only existed but were expected to operate in concert with
one another. The Lutheran confessions accepted and supported that notion, recognizing
civil government as a ‘good wor[k]’ of God (CA XVI:1; [CPCE] 2018: 49). Over against the
Anabaptists sometimes associated with the Peasants War, the Small Catechism and the
Apology affirm that even Christians under the gospel are to remain faithful and obedient
subjects of their rulers ([CPCE] 2018: 232, 365). As early modern nation states were
taking shape, their leaders were often keen to see the church integrated into the state;
such movement began taking place in Germany in the sixteenth century. Successive
theories such as episcopalism, territorialism, and collegialism offered changing theological
justification for the state’s authority being responsible at least for the external governance
of the church. The Enlightenment began a shift toward a more secular structuring of states
that moved in the direction of a dissolution of the once Christian body politic; nonetheless,
the former state churches in traditionally Lutheran lands retained a privileged status after
official breaks were made.

Both the wars of religion and the Enlightenment’s trend toward secularism contributed to a
growing sentiment in the direction of religious freedom, but the value of what many would
now consider a basic human right was a difficult lesson that took time to learn. Even the
heirs of religiously persecuted European dissidents were not necessarily interested in the

37
freedom of religion in the colonies and states they established in America, with religious
freedom first becoming enshrined in law there with the First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution in 1791. Through the twentieth century and into the present, the difference
between totalitarianism and democratically constituted states that make fundamental
provision for religious liberty often stand in stark relief in countries where Lutheran
Christians and their fellow disciples live.

Though perhaps once fit for a Christian body politic, the former model of diarchy can look
rather useless in today’s secular societies (Lienemann 1989: 397–398). Must the church
today not grasp where it stands in a given society’s public domain and express its proper
standing in that society’s secular order, with the government being but one social institution
to be considered (Huber 1999: 505)? Not only has recent movement been away from
models perhaps only fitted to legally constituted Christian states, the twentieth century and
its ecumenical movement have fostered a churchly awareness that clearly now extends
beyond a given state, such that there exists a sense of global Christian fellowship. Even
among Protestants, Christians’ loyalty to the church as it lives everywhere may rank higher
on scale of fealty than to a given state.

If Lutheranism has exhibited a weakness in its thinking about the relationship between
church and state, perhaps it has come in an occasional inability to distinguish between
divinely constituted civil authority per se and the particular form of civil authority under
which Lutheran Christians live in a given state. When for all practical purposes the lived
and known form of ecclesial life exists within and is legally constituted under a given
state – without any real ecclesial connection beyond that state – then obedience may
prove the easier option, since the alternative would require not only resistance but a
reorganization and perhaps reconceptualization of the church itself. Obedience to divinely
constituted civil authority is itself proper, and the counsel to ‘bear with the magistracy’,
even if ‘they issue any tyrannical commands when nothing can be done about it short
of disturbance or sedition’ dates at least as far back as the first edition of Melanchthon’s
Loci (1521: 185). However, thinking about civil authority entered a new era with the notion
of the social contract and election of governments by the people they are to govern.
All models applied to the diarchy of the former Christian body politic, assumed divinely
anchored authority structures that operated from the top down, but the civil authority of
democratically constituted states operates from the populace up. What then happens
when a civil authority chosen by and perhaps wildly – even messianically – popular among
the people co-opts religion and ecclesial institutions, such that ‘the Church ceases to
be the Church’ (Barmen Declaration, preface), under what becomes recognizable as
an apocalyptic form of evil? On the one hand, the twentieth century can be read as the
abandonment of the last vestiges of a Christian body politic (Oelke 2001: 1043). On the
other hand, the Lutheran and Reformed Declaration of Barmen (Bayer 1994: 336–341),
the chief statement of ecclesial resistance mounted against National Socialism, can be

38
read as a reaffirmation of a fundamental conviction of Christendom, namely that Christ’s
claim on the lives of his followers extends into ‘all areas of our life’, and thus also into the
political arena, where obedience is rendered by those who belong solely to Christ (Barmen
2–3). In a fallen world the church bears the responsibility of bearing witness, a witness that
includes reminding given societies that they do not constitute and their civil authorities that
their actions cannot bring about a divine kingdom; instead, the authorities are accountable
to God’s commands and the standard of his righteousness in a divine appointment to
provide for the rule of law and peace (Barmen 3, 5). As Bo Giertz said, ‘The Church is the
conscience of the state’ (2010: 85). The Barmen declaration preserves the notion of two
distinct divine ‘commissions’, which on the one hand restrains totalitarianism and on the
other hand keeps the church from becoming an organ of the state (Barmen 5).

It is a gift not least of Reformation’s Lutheran tradition that Christians from the World
Council of Churches to the Roman Catholic Church now prize and affirm religious freedom.
It can, therefore be affirmed that human beings in a rightly ordered form of state are
to enjoy religious freedom prior to and apart from such a right being afforded by the
given state, that religious societies are to be free to organize and regulate their own
affairs, and that churches are thus also free to publicly proclaim the content of their faith
and convictions and carry out educational and diaconal work according to the same
(Lienemann 1989: 403–404). A deepening of theo-political insight might be awaited from
a re-examination and theological reinvigoration of Luther’s and the Lutheran confessions’
doctrine of the three estates, a category almost entirely eclipsed in anglophone reception
by the doctrine of the so-called ‘two kingdoms’ (Bayer 2008: 120–53; Mumme 2015b:
214–224, 348–52). Therein the political (politia) stands alongside and thus is bounded
by not only the ecclesial (ecclesia) but also the familial and economic (oeconomia). This
structure may prove important in the twenty-first century for resisting totalitarianism also on
a human-anthropological and socio-economic level.

5 Current state of play

The state of Lutheran ecclesiology today has to do with how Lutherans relate to one
another, with their ties to other Christians, and with new challenges and opportunities
faced in view of and out from the tradition of their ecclesial heritage.

5.1 Federations, communions, and associations

The Lutheran World Federation is a global communion of churches in the Lutheran
tradition, the largest Lutheran association in the world. It is comprised of 150 churches in
nearly a hundred countries with approximately 77 million members. At its 1947 inception
it was constituted as a free association of churches, such that the federation itself would
have no power to legislate for or interfere in the autonomy of its member churches. What
membership in the LWF meant at this point was a rather open question. The fact that

39
the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod doubted the organization’s federative character
and opted to remain outside the LWF for its alleged lack of doctrinal consensus urged
deeper reflection on the nature of LWF and on the ties of its member churches to one
another. With the recognition that by granting and denying membership the LWF was
tacitly operating with a doctrinal foundation, it seemed improper for shared doctrine not to
be consummated with church fellowship (Brunner 1966). When the LWF considered the
issue of apartheid and eventually suspended white African churches over the matter, it
was clear that an association exercising a kind of church discipline was something more
than a federation, paving the way to its self-redefinition as a communion of churches
that agree in their proclamation of the word and have pulpit and altar fellowship with one
another (Root 1997). Its representatives were invited to the Second Vatican Council,
and the LWF has been Lutheranism’s leading ecumenical actor, carrying on bilateral
dialogues with Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, the Reformed, Anglicans, and Mennonites.
In recent decades relations in the LWF have been strained by issues surrounding human
sexuality, specifically by the blessing or ecclesial contracting of same-sex unions and
by the ordination of homosexual clergy, which threaten to rupture the communion. The
Mekane Yesus Church of Ethiopia, the LWF’s largest member church, broke fellowship
with the ELCA and the Church of Sweden over these issues.

The International Lutheran Council is a worldwide association of confessional Lutheran

church bodies and groups united by an unconditional commitment to the holy scriptures
and to the Lutheran confessions of the Book of Concord. More than 50 churches and
7 million baptized members are affiliated with it. It is structured with voting members,
non- voting associate members, observers, and registered organizations. As it is not
a communion, the churches associated with the ILC are independently responsible for
fellowship with one another. A statement unanimously adopted by its 2009 conference
affirmed lifelong monogamous, heterosexual unions as the divinely intended arena for the
exercise of human sexuality and classified the practice of homosexuality as a sin violating
the will of the Creator. The Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference, affiliated with
the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) is composed of thirty-four church
bodies with approximately 430,000 baptized members.

5.2 Ecumenism and post-ecumenism

Much Lutheran reflection on the church in the last century has been produced in the
orbit of and shaped by ecumenical exchange with Roman Catholics, the Reformed, and
Anglicans. Ecumenical contact has not been limited to these groups, but they are the
most significant. Important regional dialogues between Lutherans and Roman Catholics
have taken place in Germany and the United States, in addition to the Lutheran-Roman
Catholic dialogue carried out by the LWF. An early result of the international undertakings
was the 1972 Malta Report, which presents the collective church as the priestly people of

40
God, as both creature and minister of the word, while at the same time affirming that the
ministry stands opposite as well as in the congregation (§48, 50; Meyer 1984). Church and
Justification (1994) takes up elements of the ecclesiology of communion made prominent
in and around Vatican II and weighs the church in light of the Trinity (Meyer 2000 [vol.2]).
Recent efforts in Germany and at the international level have taken up the apostolicity of
the church and the ministry (Lutheran–Roman Catholic Commission on Unity 2006; Wenz,
Schneider and Sattler 2004). Lutherans and Roman Catholics recognize that ecclesiology
and particularly various understandings of (the) ministry constitute the principal obstacles
in their ecumenical efforts (Kasper 2009a: §110; Härle 1989: 279–280). Lutheran contact
and consolidation with the Reformed antedates the ecumenical movement, especially in
Germany, where Friedrich Wilhelm III’s Union of 1817 sought to merge the Lutheran and
Reformed churches under Prussian rule. In Germany the Union of Protestant Churches
(UEK), which under the umbrella of the Protestant Church of Germany (EKD), stands in full
pulpit and altar fellowship with the VELKD. The Prussian and German unions of Lutheran
and Reformed churches paved the way for the Community of Protestant Churches in
Europe (CPCE), formerly known as the Leuenberg Church Fellowship (Mannermaa 1981).
Its founding document, the Leuenberg Agreement (1973), lacked an overt ecclesiology, but
the topic was taken up by The Church of Jesus Christ (1995), which presents the church
as a reality defined by the message of the gospel and declares ordered ministry to be
necessary. Together the Church of England and the Church of Sweden were forerunners
in what would become the ecumenical movement, affirming intercommunion already in the
early 1920s, with the Church of Finland joining thereafter. The Porvoo Common Statement
(1993), signed initially by the Anglican churches of Britain and Ireland and by the Nordic
and Baltic Lutheran churches, resulted in the full communion of these churches by coming
to official agreement about episcopacy and episcopal succession. As orthodoxy of doctrine
was assumed, the statement has a very specific focus; it was accepted by the Church of
Denmark in 2010, whereas the Latvian Church has remained an observer in the Porvoo
Communion.

Risto Saarinen has indicated that Lutheran ecclesiology as shaped by its ecumenical
endeavours faces the question of ‘Rome or Geneva?’, noting that German sentiment pulls
more in the Reformed direction of Leuenberg, whereas the ‘higher-church’ sympathies
of the Nordic countries, some of whom do not belong to the CPCE, gravitate more
toward the institutional ecclesiologies operative around Canterbury and Rome (Saarinen
2008: 182–183). At the same time non-European Lutherans have called attention to
the life-and-death struggle for a confessional centre in all Protestant denominations,
including their own (Braaten 1998: 9). Echoing sentiments of Ephraim Radner, David
Yeago (2004) has pointed to the thinning relevance and gradual disappearance of
denominations, doubting their viability as subjects in the ecumenical process. In view
of the first decades of the twenty-first century it seems likely that matters of human

41
sexuality, usually filed by Lutherans under the ecclesiologically unrelated heading of
‘ethics’, will give rise to a necessary re-examination of theological anthropology. Inasmuch
as theological anthropology is antecedent to or bound up with all matters of human
relation and community, the ecumenical shakeup may prove as dramatic as the current
denominational turbulences. Tensions within the LWF, the formation of the Mission
Province in Sweden and the Mission Diocese in Finland, as well as the separations of
Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (2001) and the North American Lutheran
Church (2010) from the ELCA all point in this direction.

5.3 Directions toward the future

As Lutheran ecclesiology faces the challenge of articulating an understanding of the
church that is capable of addressing and theologically shaping its social form (Schwöbel
2002), such that personal faith and ecclesial institution stand in harmony with one another
(Anselm 1999: 1101), two factors seem of particular import.

First, though receiving less attention today than a generation ago, communion
ecclesiology still holds promise, if it is allowed to ferment a bit more. The possibilities for
a Trinitarian approach to communion ecclesiology might be refreshed by christological
infusion, especially by observing the motion of the incarnation. Though the incarnation
involved the divine Son taking a human nature as it were up and into himself, on the level
of human history and experience the incarnation was definitively and redemptively the
movement of God condescending toward human beings. As the communion of the church
is related to the essential communion of the Holy Trinity, the God-toward-human motion
of the incarnation – the motion a Word external to human beings for their salvation (cf.
CA V) – must be observed. Likewise, the doctrine of processions, which can be related
to communication and certainly to communion, does not support ontological stratification
of persons, but it does entail priority as well elements of activity and passivity in the
communion of the immanent Trinity. If communion ecclesiology is coordinated with the
doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the church cannot begin in a homogeneity lacking
source.

Second, inasmuch as the church is the church as a perpetually existing, historical

reality, it always has a social form. The current form must be examined against its divine
foundations, such that formation and re-formation take place in view of them. As Lutherans
take stock of the form of their churches in the twenty-first century, it is worth bearing in
mind that the shape of the church suggested by the reformers and their confessions,
itself claiming to be the reinvigoration of a more ancient pattern, remains a vision awaiting
realization. In Lutheranism’s first centuries, a real-pneumatic ecclesial authority capable
of exercising a kerygmatic-doctrinal and sacramental jurisdiction, even over the highest
personal instances of civil authority, was a political impossibility. What Lutheran bishop,

42
superintendent, or parson could turn a king or prince away from the church’s altar?
Given the unfolding magisterial reformation in Lutheran lands, the possibility of an office
of oversight not backed by the sword and operating with authority to visit, to oversee
preaching and teaching and doctrine, to put open sin under the lesser ban, and to
ordain first became a possibility with emigration and the gradual disassociation of states
from their Lutheran churches. In the more recent centuries, the political shift toward
representative systems of democratic governance, fused with a pietistically supplemented
understanding of the priesthood of all believers, has meant that the ministerial leaders of
Lutheran churches are still subject to a personal instance of authority that holds sway also
over the civil realm – namely constituents capable of casting votes. To a greater or lesser
degree, this fact is baked into presbyterial-synodical polities among Lutherans the world
over. Faced today with not only post-Christian cultures but new forms of post-pluralist
totalitarianism, Lutherans must ask what form of the church will not surrender its holiness
to secularism nor its catholicity to isolationism.

If the ancient episcopal federalism commended by the reformers and their confessions
receives such attention (cf. SA III,viii:9), elements of priority and progeny, activity and
passivity, externality and movement will become discernible in this form of communion.
Its bishops, however, cannot stand alone. Either their office owes to a divine institution
and can claim apostolic foundation, or it does not and cannot. This question cannot be
answered in either direction without appeal to holy scripture and without clarification
of what in holy scripture counts as the Word of God and what in the New Testament
qualifies as apostolic (see 1.1 above). Especially if their office is understood to be
apostolic and attested by the apostolic scriptures, the bishops themselves must obediently
receive the canonically witnessed teaching of the apostles. Likewise, ‘a new symbolic
theology’ (Kasper 2009a: §107) will be required. No teaching authority of the church of
Christ can claim to be its first voice of authority. All Christians, including those overseeing
the church, are heirs and obedient to the faith as it has been truly confessed before
them. The church cannot live without recognized, authoritative, and therefore binding
doctrine that stands above the fluctuations of contemporary intuition and shifting collective
preferences. It, including its overseers, is the obedient heir of the faith as that faith is truly
expressed and handed down. Only as the church acknowledges what has been spoken
rightly and truly – only as it can indicate authoritative confessions of the faith – is it in a
position to speak the Gospel authentically today.

Attributions
Copyright Jonathan Mumme (CC BY-NC)

Preprint: this text represents an accepted version of the article. A full published version is
forthcoming.

43
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• Further reading
◦ The Augsburg Confession. 2000. ‘The Augsburg Confession’, in The Book of
Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Edited by Robert
Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
◦ Kinder, Ernst. 1960. Der evangelische Glaube und die Kirche. Berlin:
Lutherisches Verlagshaus.
◦ Luther, Martin. 1966. Luther’s Works 44. Edited by James Atkinson. Philadelphia:
Fortress.
◦ Pannenberg, Wolfhart. 1998a. Systematic Theology. Translated by G. W.
Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
◦ Piepkorn, Arthur Carl. 2006. ‘What the Symbols Have to Say about the Church’,
in The Church: Selected Writings of Arthur Carl Piepkorn, Volume 1. Edited by
Michael P. Plekon and William S. Wiecher. Delhi, NY: ALPB Books, 19–58.
◦ Saarinen, Risto. 2008. ‘Lutheran Ecclesiology’, in The Routledge Companion to
the Christian Church. Edited by Gerard Mannion and Lewis S. Mudge. New York:
Routledge, 170–186.
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◦ The Augsburg Confession. 2000. ‘The Augsburg Confession’, in The Book of
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