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Faithfulness in Christ's Mission Lutheran Mission Matters, the journal of the Lutheran Lutheran Society for Missiology, serves as an international Lutheran forum for the exchange of ideas and discussion of issues related to proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ globally. Mission Matters TheThe Lutheran Lutheran Society Society for Missiology for Missiology https://LSFM.Global Volume XXVII, No. 1 (Issue 54) May 2019 Faithfulness in Christ’s Mission John T. Pless Abstract: Hermann Sasse (1895–1976) taught theology in Germany and Australia, emerged as a leading Lutheran theologian of the last century. His ecumenical contacts were broad and his knowledge of developments within global Lutheranism was informed and perceptive. Not the least of Sasse’s interest was the place of mission within the Lutheran Church and how it relates to the confession of the faith. This essay explores this connection based on two primary essays by Sasse. Presumably, Jesus’ parable of the talents was chosen to give focus to this issue to accent the tragic possibility that the Lord’s people might also bury the endowment entrusted to them in the ground, not utilizing it for the good of the Kingdom. While, no doubt, this parable has multiple applications for missions, this article focuses on confessional faithfulness in mission. Sasse himself recognized as much when in a 1942 essay, “Flight From Dogma: Remarks on Bultmann’s ‘Demythologization’ of the New Testament,” he wrote on a similar parable of accountability in Luke 16, “Must she [the church] who should have been a steward of the mysteries of God hear in that voice the voice of one who says to her: ‘Give account of your stewardship, for you cannot be a steward any longer! [Lk 16:2].”1 And again in a 1956 essay, “The Confessional Problem in World Lutheranism,” he makes a direct reference to the parable of the talents when he writes, “Is that really burying one’s talent if he [the Lutheran] does not enter into every fellowship of that [in this case, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA] ? Did Luther bury his talent when he refused the hand of fellowship to Zwingli [at Marburg in 1529]? Did the apostles do it when they refused fellowship with false teachers?”2 Sasse recognized that the church of Jesus Christ has been entrusted with the good deposit of the Gospel, which can never be divorced from dogma. The Lord requires faithfulness in the confession of His truth. Sasse develops the implications of this fidelity to the truth of the Gospel for mission. John T. Pless (BA, MDiv, DLitt) is assistant professor of pastoral ministry and missions at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana and a visiting professor of practical theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Pretoria, South Africa. He is author of several books and numerous journal articles. His previous work on Sasse has appeared in The Dictionary of Luther and the Lutheran Tradition ed. Timothy Wengert (Baker Academic Press, 2017) and Twentieth Century Lutheran Theologians ed. Mark C. Mattes (Vanderoeck and Ruprecht, 2013). [email protected] Copyright 2019 Lutheran Society for Missiology. Used by permission. View Lutheran Mission Matters 27, no. 1 (2019) at https://lsfm.global/. Membership in LSFM is available at https://lsfm.global/joinlsfm.html. E-mail [email protected] to purchase a print copy of a single issue. Faithfulness in Christ’s Mission 75 To understand how Sasse does this, we need to pay some attention to his own biography. Who was Hermann Sasse (1895–1976)? He was born into a middle-class family in Thuringia. Sasse would enter the University of Berlin, where he studied with some of the most prestigious theologians of the early twentieth century, including Adolph von Harnack, Adolph Deissmann, Julius Katfan, Reinhold Seeberg, and Karl Holl. His university studies were interrupted by World War I, as he enlisted as an officer in the Germany army where he would see action in some of the bloodiest battles of that war. Like many of his contemporaries, Sasse would find the war to be the crucible that would test and ultimately crush the convictions of classical liberalism which were mediated to him by his Berlin teachers. The devastation and suffering that Sasse witnessed as a soldier convinced him of the futility of liberalism’s optimistic view of the human capacity for ethical progress. After the war, Sasse would complete his doctoral studies and serve as a pastor in Berlin. In the 1925–26 academic year, Sasse pursued a year of post-doctoral studies at Hartford Seminary in the United States. This year was significant for two reasons. First, it would give Sasse intimate knowledge of church life, including that of the various Lutheran bodies in the United States. Second, Sasse himself states that it was during this year that he became a confessional Lutheran through his reading of Wilhelm Loehe’s Three Books about the Church. Sasse’s knowledge of the American religious scene in these years is reflected in his first book, published in 1927 under the title, American Christianity and the Church. This monograph contains Sasse’s observations on the place of “undogmatic Christianity” in American life. The young German theologian describes the pragmatism of the American church when he writes “It is a church which has renounced the idea that it is possible to possess the truth and the requirements necessitated by that truth for carrying out its work.”3 In contrast to mainline American Protestantism in 1927, Sasse held out hope for Lutherans in America. Largely spared the skirmishes of the so-called Modernist/Fundamentalist debate over the Bible, the works righteousness of the Social Gospel Movement, and the suspicion that creeds and liturgy were detrimental to growth and unity, Lutherans were not institutionally united; and they were something of wallflowers in the American religious garden. Sasse wrote, And the Lutherans are not united, leading an isolated life, having little influence on the intellectual life of the nation. But they are living and growing churches. If the movement toward unity (the first great consequence of which was the formation of the United Lutheran Church in America in 1918) continues and leads to the unification of all Lutherans it will be one of the most significant churches in America. The life of these churches dispels the notion that Lutheranism’s doctrine of justification Copyright 2019 Lutheran Society for Missiology. Used by permission. View Lutheran Mission Matters 27, no. 1 (2019) at https://lsfm.global/. Membership in LSFM is available at https://lsfm.global/joinlsfm.html. E-mail [email protected] to purchase a print copy of a single issue. 76 Lutheran Mission Matters necessarily leads to quietism. There is in America perhaps no more active a church than the Missouri Synod, which is the most dogmatically rigorous Lutheran Church in the country. The history of the organization of this church demonstrates that Lutheranism can exist in forms other than a state church or dependent upon the state (as we hear happily repeated time and time again in Europe). Lutheranism is never more vibrant than where it is free from guardianship by a secular authority. 4 Sasse would remain conversant with American Lutheran leaders and theologians for the remainder of his life. He was particularly interested in the Missouri Synod, for he saw in it the last large confessional Lutheran church body that stood against the forces of theological liberalism and unionism. [Sasse] was impressed by Shifts in the Missouri Synod led Sasse to Loehe’s understanding of wonder if the synod had buried its legacy and the church as apostolic, instead embraced a future more attune to the catholic, and confessional. predominant ecumenical trends of the middle Loehe’s description of twentieth century. mission as the one church It was the nineteenth-century Bavarian of God in motion would pastor, Wilhelm Loewe, that Sasse would leave its imprint on Sasse. identify with most closely. He was impressed by Loehe’s understanding of the church as apostolic, catholic, and confessional. Loehe’s description of mission as the one church of God in motion would leave its imprint on Sasse. While he was not uncritical of Loehe, Sasse appreciated his courage in both confession and mission.5 It might be said that Sasse was both an ecumenical confessionalist and a confessional ecumenist. His passion for the truth of the apostolic Gospel and his love of the Church catholic compelled him to be both. It is with this in mind that we turn to two essays where Sasse addresses the Lutheran Church’s responsibility for mission. The first essay, written in 1946, “The Question of the Church’s Unity on the Mission Field,” addresses a practical challenge that would naturally arise in the years immediately after World War II, as Western churches were able to either resume or initiate mission endeavors in Asia and Africa. In this piece, Sasse observes that, given the multiplicity of denominations involved in evangelistic work in places where the Gospel had not been previously preached, the contemporary question of the unity of the church arose from the mission field. The World Missionary Conference of Edinburgh in 1910 was the birthplace of the modern ecumenical movement. At Edinburgh, the issue of unity was not theoretical but pragmatically driven by the desire to evangelize the world effectively in the twentieth century. John Mott (1865–1955), an American Methodist layman, spearheaded the conference, Copyright 2019 Lutheran Society for Missiology. Used by permission. View Lutheran Mission Matters 27, no. 1 (2019) at https://lsfm.global/. Membership in LSFM is available at https://lsfm.global/joinlsfm.html. E-mail [email protected] to purchase a print copy of a single issue.
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