In my last post I noted the problem of responding badly to criticism.
A historical example occurred in the 1600s in Germany. Back in 1651, the faculty of the University of Wittenburg was responding to charges from Roman Catholics that the Lutheran Church was invalid. The person questioning the validity apparently was Erhard, Truchsess of Wetzhausen. One of his questions was the lack of Lutheran missions to the Orient, the tropics, and the New World. The Roman Catholic church was sending out missionaries (admittedly tied to colonial expansion) while the Lutherans, generally, were not.
The faculty of the University of Wittenburg responded to this particular question with three responses. I have not found the exact document (and I don’t understand German or Latin anyway), but according to Robert Blincoe, (Link for his Post) drawing from Kenneth Mullholland, the three responses can be summarized as:
Only the apostles were privileged to fulfill the Great Commission. <It is not the job of the church today, it was the job of the apostles>
No non-Christian is excused before God because of ignorance of the gospel. Those who do not believe are presumed to have rejected the gospel when it was preached to them by the apostles during New Testament times. <It is not the job of the church today, it was the job/fault of the ancestors>
Rulers are responsible to propagate the gospel in their own territories alone. The Wittenberg fathers were satisfied that the rulers had faithfully carried out this duty. <It is not the job of the church today, it is the job of the civil rulers>
This is a pretty shaky take. Well before William Carey’s pamphlet on the Great Commission, there were many who had been able to see that Great Commission was not limited to the apostles. Blaming the ancestors of the heathens for not propagating the gospel within their own people is such an odd perspective. Perhaps the original explained it better. As it is here, it seems to suggest that the vast majority of the world had one chance to respond to the gospel, and if they failed to do so at that time, it was just and good that the countless generations after should remain without hope. How does that make sense? The third point, if anything, appears to be the weakest, although it is the easiest to understand why it was referenced, considering the historical relationship to the Peace of Augsburg and the Treaty of Westphalia. Cuius regio, eius religio (Whose reign, his religion) placed the religion of the masses in the hands of the local ruler.
In the article “Is the Great Commission Still Valid for Lutherans” by Robert Kolb, <Click here for the article> the suggestion is made that the faculty, although drawing from some beliefs that existed from Medieval times, erred in part in that they were responding to a very specific criticism from the outside.
From that perspective, their response was poor, in part, because they were hyper-focused on a narrow question. They could have responded much more positively. They could have said that Lutherans HAVE been involved in mission outreach. They have not done so with great energy yet, but until three years before, Lutherans have been fighting for the right to exist, to say nothing of flourish or propagate. Alternatively, they could have gone further and taken the challenge to heart and responded to the criticism with a certain amount of repentance. Yes, Lutherans and Protestants, more generally, need to do more than consolidate their gains locally. They need to reach out to those who need the pearls of the gospel.
Of course, they might not have responded either way because they believed what they wrote. However, even if that is the case, it does feel like a less than reflective response.
I am reminded of numerous occasions where I have heard people share the belief that the God of the Old Testament is mean and judgmental, while the God of the New Testament is warm and loving. This is an understandable concern. However, often I have heard Christian “apologists” respond by saying that “God in the New Testament is pretty mean and judgmental too!” and then go into pointing out places in the NT where God doesn’t sound so loving. The problem there is that the questioners were imagining a violent and angry God, and the respondent is doing nothing more than reinforcing that viewpoint. Now, if one actually talked to those “apologists,” one would find that they don’t view God as angry, vindictive, and mean-spirited. Rather, they were simply defending a position by attacking the other’s concern.
In a sense, one loses the war by trying to win the battle. God is multi-dimensional, and doubling down on one dimension to counter the other person’s one-dimensional God is not helpful.
Countering Roman Catholic charges of the Lutheran movement being a sub-biblical movement by using two completely non-biblical arguments, and one fairly dubious interpretation of a biblical passage, was simply doomed to be a long-term losing response, even if it felt like a good defense in the short-term.
That should be a warning to us. More than once decades ago, I would use arguments to counter statements of my “opponent” that I did not consider to be particularly valid. I felt it worked in the moment. Later, I felt convicted for that. My responses must be better than simply “meeting the needs of the moment.”
