The parallels between Everyone a Minister and pietism are unmistakable. Both Spener and Feucht offer proposals for reforming the church. Both of their proposals reflect a shift in theology from God’s objective external gifts [Word and Sacrament] to the subjectivity and activism of the believer.
For both Spener and Feucht the real center of the church’s life is not the divine service where Jesus delivers the benefits of his dying and rising through the preached gospel and the sacraments…For Feucht, the goal is changing the believer’s life so that he exercises his priesthood by doing his ministry of evangelism. When the believer carries out this one vocation, Christ is present, and an irrelevant church becomes a most relevant church….
The Pietism of Pia Desideria and Everyone a Minister is quite dangerous. The extra nos character of the preached gospel and the sacramental gospel are exchanged for an intra nos subjectivity and activism of the believer. This is a confusion of law and gospel that does not serve the church faithfully or well.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Sound Familiar?
The following quote feels a lot like where some in the LCMS leadership are attempting to position the Synod. Quoted from Brent Kuhlman's "Oscar Feucht's Everyone a Minister: Pietismus Revivivus," as quoted in Dr. John C. Wohlrabe, Jr.'s paper "Doctrinal Integrity and Outreach Within the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod":
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2 comments:
Sadly, the Pietists are running the asylum in the LCMS. Lord, have mercy!
We are now LCMS, official just this past Sunday. And this sounds familiar to my ex-Southern Baptist/PCA ears...ALL TOO familiar.
At length what will happen, we experienced this MUCH in the SB religion: Church yard duties will become king and all the other vocations will take a back seat at best, at worst forsaken. Parents will fail to be parents, grandparents fail to be grand parents. Your every day vocation, what we call a "job", will simply be an occasion to "do evangelism". You will be drawn more and more into the church yard to do the "higher callings" and every unbeliever, including other believers who stay at their stations dutifully will slowly despise you for it. While you are slaving away on a weekend or whatever your job calls you too, the church yard busy bodies "get off" because they have some church yard duty to do. It will do nothing but get worse and worse and worse and worse...
Larry KY
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