JPeter, thanks very much for posting that link. I think that when Lutherans explore their history and dig deeper, past the Catechisms and encounter the Book of Concord, we are left in the same place as Fr. Fenton - stay or go? Should we even be here?
Very thought provoking read.
Any Lutheran comment on this portion:
Over the centuries, fueled no doubt by polemics, persecutions and historical events,
what has occurred is a sectarian, if not heretical, shift as remarkable as it is regrettable. This
shift, I believe, is traced to and thereby born from the inversion of the catholic principle. The
result is that we now have been taught to read, hold to, and defend the confessions as the
definition not of the holy catholic faith, but the Lutheran faith. And we have been
overwhelmed with the notion that the confessions are not* a *but
the true and correct
exhibition of the faith which, in turn, allows us to ignore most especially the ecumenical
councils whose creeds and canons are the very historical and theological foundation of our
confessions. Subsequently, we are helpless to think, speak, identify, and describe ourselves
not as the catholic church of the west, but as nothing other than one church among many
or, worse yet, as remnants of the church which will never be incarnationally seen with our
eyes, handled with our hands, or in any other way concretely manifest. In short, the
Lutherans stopped being Lutheran the day they believed themselves to be Lutheran rather
than the authentic continuation of the western catholic church. (Or, more simply, our
spiritual fathers eased themselves away from the holy catholic church when they described
themselves as “Lutheran.”) For that we could blame the Jesuits who shrewdly made stick
the moniker that named our increasingly sectarian forefathers after (so they said) the prime
heretic. But, in point of fact, we only have ourselves to thank for reducing our confessional
heritage to one book, and for letting that book alone be the definition of the visibility of our
church.30 In doing so, we have given rise to the desire to form and break communion
fellowships at will; we have nurtured the false notion that Christ in His ecclesial presence is
completely unlike Christ in His sacramental and incarnation presence;31 we have rendered
the word “church” devoid of any concrete meaning outside of the local congregation; and
we have reduced the trans-parochial understanding of the church to a voluntary association
of like-confessing congregations.
29
)