The Case for the Common Cup

Below I will give three short theses that I believe defend the use of the common cup in Lutheran liturgical practice:

1. A Matter of Reverence 

When we forgo the use of the common cup for individual plastic cups that resemble those use in medical practice, we lose a sense of reverence embodied in the ritual of the Sacrament. We are not treating the blood of Christ with the proper respect, and by using plastic cups we are treating the sacramental elements as if it were just wine and nothing more. The ritual of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper should emphasize that as a congregation we are coming into the very presence of God, and should come with a sense of awe and mystery, which in my opinion is broken by the use of individual plastic cups.

2. The loss of communion among the congregation 

Taking the Lord's Supper as a congregation symbolizes the communion among us, our doctrinal unity and our union with Christ.  As a poor use of adiaphora, individual cups are in danger of denying this reality and reducing the taking of the Lord's blood to an individualized event rather than one we all share in the Common cup. Furthermore it contradicts the practice of the Lord's Supper started by Christ during the last supper, as Jesus handed out one cup to be distributed among his disciples.

3. Treating the elements as something unhealthy

Finally, the use of the individual cups is a Protestant inheritance, from the idea that the use of the Common Cup is something that can make us unwell, as if the drinking of the Lord's blood is unhygienic and unsanitary. Of course all efforts should be made to keep the Common Cup clean but without resorting to a Protestant practice which inherently denies the real presence, and contradicts Jesus's use of a common cup to distribute the elements.

Man The Lifeboats! - A Response

The original article can be found on the Gottesdienst page here.

While Pr. Beane makes several very good points throughout his article,  I have two points of contention with the overall theme.

1. Firstly I find that Pr. Beane grossly overestimates how many lifeboats exist in the LCMS. Doing a brief survey of churches in my area, I see a lot of Evangelical practices creeping into the daily life of the church from the removal of priestly vestments, the use of heterdoxical books in bible studies, and the removal of the common cup from the Service of the Sacrament. And then taking a broader picture, the net cast by the Radical Lutheran influence of 1517, Forde and Paulson grows ever wider like a cancerous tumor. I don't see lifeboats, I see boats that have already sprung a leak, taken on water, and cannot support the weight of the survivors.

2. Secondly, this article betrays a very insular attitude. Let's all rush to the safety of our local fiefdoms and let the institutions crumble if they must.  For the local church to remain healthy, a hierarchy is needed, to keep it in check. If the old hierarchy crumbles, a new one is needed to maintain orthodoxy and order. Lifeboats left adrift on a vast ocean cannot survive without the resources of a mothership. After the Titanic sank, the 705 survivors found rescue on board the Carpathia. If the LCMS sinks, then the survivors must tether themselves to a new institution,  one sturdier and less unsinkable than the last, one that keeps watch for potential ecclesiastical icebergs.

In the name of Christ. Amen. 

The Subtle Soft Antinomianism of Modern Lutheranism

Have you ever had a valid criticism about yiur church's practice and doctrine, only to be told "well no church is perfect" and "well we're all sinners here"? Not only are these responses are a quick passive aggressive way to shut down criticism and discourse. But they also subtly undermine a key part of Christian identity and our growth in grace and spiritual maturity. Your pastor may exhort you to good works in his preaching, he may emphasize the third use of the Law according to the Formula of Concord, but in modern Lutheranism I've often found a significant gap between theory and practice especially when you have valid criticisms that go unanswered, and are usually responded to with the same accusations of 8th commandment breaking or some other unrepentant sin. 

Of course I hold to the simul et peccator and I emphasize the continual need for repentance in the Christian life. We're not talking sinless perfectionism here. However as I read Scripture, the Apostles writing to the churches never address them as sinners. None of Paul's letters start "to the sinners" but rather he addresses them as saints. This saintly status is positioned in Christ's death, life and resurrection but it carries with it an important change, Paul addresses the churches as those who have put off the old life and put on the new. The old Adam is now an enemy to put to death, and the Spirit is our primary guide into a life of holiness, however weak, fragmentary and imperfect that might seem. What the "there is no perfect church" etc comments seem to suggest is that God is perfectly happy to leave us where we are  and any kind of suggestions on how to improve church life and practice are unwelcome. That we're supposed to learn to live with leaven and controversy in our midst, keep our mouths shut, and be good little peons. 

All these observations inevitably lead me to the current state of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, a church body which at the time of writing I have taken the decision to leave. This decision is for personal reasons as well as for theological ones, but the last nail in the coffin was the publication of the newly annotated Large Catechism with ELCA and women authors adding essays imbued with CRT and other troubling passages, and that are meant as teaching tools in our seminaries and churches. The involvement of Steven Paulson, a Radical Lutheran who denies vicarious atonement, in this confessional document was a bridge too far for me, and I will no longer fellowship with a church body that allows wolves in its midst, and a church body that responds to valid criticisms with vague charges of unchristian conduct and racism. A church body that conducts witchhunts to go after laymen who dare speak out while opening the arms of fellowship to someone like Paulson. Furthermore I am saddened by the depth of silence I hear from faithful pastors in the LCMS with public clout like Bryan Wolfmueller and others. Our supposed watchmen at the gates have not only allowed the wolves to enter the sheep pen, but to eat at our tables. I can no longer tolerate this behavior and so I do what I must, I'm breaking fellowship.

And may God have mercy on the LCMS. (I wish I did.)

In the name of Christ. Amen.

My Frustrations with Chris Rosebrough

Over the years I have had significant points of contention with Pr. Chris Rosebrough and his Fighting for the Faith discernment ministry. For the sake of brevity I've broken them down into several bullet points, so as to highlight the main areas of error and personal concern I have with Rosebrough and FFTF more specifically. 

1. Old boy network-type associations

Rosebrough's discernment ministry is so laser focused on the charismatic movement and the New Apostolic Reformation that if often skips over significant errors in other Evangelical teachers, specifically those on the Reformed side. Rosebrough's associations with Reformed baptists of the MacArthurite ilk has often left me with a bad taste in the mouth, as Rosebrough unites with them to go after the hyper charismatics while side stepping the heterdoxical teachings that teachers like MacArthur, Justin Peters, etc purport including Lordship Salvation and the denial of the means of grace in the Sacraments. Our confessions do not treat these issues as secondary as evangelicals often do, and Rosebrough as a pastor took an ordination vow to uphold them not to sugarcoat over them to suit his Protestant audience. On a more personal note I suffered a great deal of spiritual abuse from the morbid introspection that teachers like MacArthur and Paul Washer induce, and for Rosebrough and Steven Kozar to throw his support behind them has often felt like an act of betrayal. 

2. A personal lack of discernment 

Over the years Rosebrough has lacked discernment in his relationships and associations which has brought him into conflict with other Lutherans. I'm thinking specifically of his friendship with the Reformed apologist JD Hall, who has taken to Twitter to personally insult other Lutherans and those who disagree with him. It's only been more recently when Hall was outed by his own congregation for egregious personal sins that Rosebrough has spoken out. Where was he when the wife of a prominent Lutheran pastor was being attacked? 

A similar issue arose with his support of Tullian Tchividjian. I confess to having a blind spot myself when it came to Tchividjian's Radical Lutheran leanings. But as a confessional pastor, Rosebrough should have known better to throw his weight behind him, despite his Gerhard Forde influences and his relationship with the 1517 ministry and its history of soft antinomianism.  So when news of Tchividjian's adultery came to light, Rosebrough looked equally foolish. I see this as a repeated pattern in Rosebrough's choice of associations. 

3. The targets of FFTF

As I mentioned Rosebrough's focus is on the charismatic movement and more specifically the NAR and Word of Faith false teachers. On the whole he highlights the more prominent teachers but at times, he goes after false prophets in this movement who have little influence and have significant mental ailments in a way that is unhealthy and unfruitful. Videos on Heidi Baker for example are often reduced to comedy skits, such as is the case with his prophecy bingo programs where clearly demon possessed teachers are made the subject of laughter and abuse. While I see the need to expose their false preaching, I wish it could be done in a more mature way without the need for memes and skits.

Women Teachers?

1 Corinthians 14: 33-35

As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

1 Timothy 3:12

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.

Paul's prohibition on women exercising authority in the church remains clear-cut and a non-negotiable foundation of church polity.  However in recent decades mainline Protestants have foregone Paul's command in the name of egalitarianism,  diversity and inclusion.  The LCMS isn't immune to this latest fad of modernity, adapting to the culture around it, rather than conforming to the standards of Scripture. There's a significant rise in deaconesses adopting teaching roles including men, women writing essays on confessional material for pastors as with the latest edition of the Large Catechism, and women serving as self appointed apologists. In a recent conversation with Dr. Nancy Almodovar, one of the latter,  I was told that her permission to serve as an apologist and teach men came from her husband and pastor. Since when, do men get to ignore a command from Scripture to give women a role that is forbidden to them. To me this is another sign of the increasing feminization (or to put it more crudely, pussification) of men within the church who have given up on asserting their God given authority and instead are letting women usurp leadership roles to appear more palatable to the wider culture. The usual Scriptural excuse given for this egalitarian move is the example of Priscilla and Aquila teaching Apollos in Acts 18. However, on closer examination of the text, both parties take part in the private counseling of Apollos: "When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately."  Priscilla does not exhort any special authority in this situation but rather seems to work in tandem with her husband, as one under his headship. In the same conversation with Dr. Almodovar,  she placed some significance on the placing of Priscilla's name before her husband's, as if this granted her some special status. However the text does not attach any primary importance to the placing of the names, so in my opinion Almodovar's contention is an argument from silence to excuse her unbiblical role in the church. Sadly she's not the only one. With the rise of woke ideology in our culture, our churches, our seminaries and our Synod, the slippery slope to women's ordination appears to be in the near horizon for the LCMS' future, one of many contentious issues that is polluting the purity of Lutheran theology. 

May God give us godly teachers and leaders who will hold fast to Scripture rather than trying to appease the culture.  Help us follow the way of repentance.

In the name of Christ. Amen.

My Frustrations With Dr. Jordan Cooper

Recently I lost my temper over Cooper's position on the Lord's Supper, and for that I emailed him an apology and I genuinely regret the personal tone of my attacks on him on social media. However, I still need to deliberate on what my frustrations are with his approach to Lutheran theology. 

I genuinely believe that philosophy and Scripture don't mix. Whenever you blend the two historically bad things happen, whether it's the Aristotlean view of the cosmos taken by Catholic scholastics which led to the persecution of Galileo and Copernicus by the church, or the Platonic view of the Lord's Supper originated by Calvin and still in vogue today. And lately I've felt that in his videos when Cooper discusses theology, philosophy wins out, and Scripture takes a back seat, while Cooper takes us through a pot pourri of various views held by the most obscure Lutheran theologians from the post Reformation age.  My frustration with this approach came to a head with a discussion on the Lord's Supper, both on Twitter and on YouTube, where Cooper attacked Lutherans for using terms like 'physical' and 'local' to describe the sacramental nature of Christ's presence in the Supper. In the course of this debate, Cooper didn't clarify his terms and caused more confusion and contradiction, using terms like 'real' and 'substantial' to describe Christ's presence with which I personally don't have any issues. Meanwhile those of us who describe Christ's mysterious presence in the Supper as 'physical', citing Luther's description of orally eating the body and body of Christ in Article VII of the Formula of Concord, were mischaractized as cannibals and believers in transubstantiation in Cooper's debate group on Facebook. This was not a healthy debate, and for some on Twitter, it created unbelief in the Lord's Supper and for others it caused them to walk away from Lutheranism altogether. To which Cooper responded with a seemingly uncaring shrug, and a confessional game of gotcha, where Cooper and his followers held the title of Confessional Gatekeeper over the rest of us, and accused us of not knowing our own confessions. There appears to be a lack of pastoral responsibility and care to Cooper's approach to online debates, where his scholastic and philosophical approach to theological terms results in a lack of clarification, contradiction and confusion that has the potential for spiritual harm. It's not edifying, when his superior knowledge of Lutheran history is sometimes wielded as a weapon rather than something to build us up in the faith. To be fair, I have profited from his podcasts over the years, and his opposition to the influence of Radical Lutheranism is something with which I can stand in solidarity. However I'm concerned with the philosophical and academic influences that maybe seeping into Cooper's thinking. Cooper himself has mischaractized this as anti-intellectualism and a hostile response to perceived East Coast elitism, a charge I deny citing Luther's own opposition to the influence of Aristotle in Christian thought, and the limits of human reason and wisdom to define things that are in essence mysterious and unknowable. "Reason is a whore...the greatest enemy of faith", said Luther during his debates with the Catholic scholar Erasmus, a quote that would be beneficial for all of us including Jordan to refamiliarise ourselves with.

In the name of Christ. Amen.

Autism and Anger Management

At the risk of sounding like an AA 12 Step program: I have a problem. The manifestation of that problem is my anger, irritability and frustration with people, whose volcanic influence can leave me seething for days, and then once it resides comes the guilt, the self-punishment, and the withdrawal. The root problem is my autism spectrum disorder which went undiagnosed until 2015, and was precipitated (I believe) by the sudden onset of cerebral ataxia when I was a five, a neurological disorder that affects the cerebellum, and causes difficulties with speech and hand coordination. You see, my brain doesn't quite work the same way as yours. Because of the stunted development caused by my ataxia, my emotional IQ is not the same as neurotypicals. (see video below).

When stress, anxiety, or anger rears itself, my logical and rational faculties take a back seat to the emotional part of my brain whose thinking and feeling processes are that of an adolescent mind. So you can see how everyday interactions can be more difficult, keeping my cool on social media is an everyday challenge because I get drawn into arguments and confrontations so easily, and then my fight or flight response tends to kick in, and my perceptions of people that disagree with me on various points gets warped so that they become public enemy number one in my mind. Its difficult enough for my autistic brain to understand and interpret social cues and responses in the real world, let alone on social media when I can't see a face or understand the tone of speech being employed.

My self awareness of how my anger manifests has grown the last few years, but my ability to manage it hasn't so much, aside from a few grounding techniques and risperidone that help me more in the outside world. So my options on how to manage myself on social media come down to three options, self isolation, limiting my time on Facebook, and self editing my responses, and trying not to get drawn into every battle. The latter seems the most doable, because outside of social media, I have very few connections to the outside world. Making and keeping friends, and long term relationships, has been a lifelong struggle for me, and my fears of rejection tend to keep me from reaching out. So for the last 20 years the internet has been my primary mode of connecting with the rest of humanity, and its very hard to break that habit especially when people make it hard to connect because they sense there's something different about you, something they'd rather not be around. In that capacity I share a lot of similarities with the YouTuber Autism On The Inside who put out this video with which I could instantly relate:

In conclusion, I'm explaining all this to explain how and why my anger flares up on social media, not to make excuses for it. Because in Lutheran circles, I'm often misunderstood and mischaracterized as some kind of monster, a hangover from my failed marriage. I really don't enjoy being this Jekyll and Hyde character, and by the grace of God, I hope to do better in future. But I can't do it without your support and prayers. In the name of Christ. Amen.