Thoughts on Demographics, Higher Criticism, and the Future of the LCMS

We members of the LCMS are delusional. I have suspected that for years. Now, however, there is a survey to prove it.

Lyman Stone, an LCMS layman and demographer, conducted a survey last year entitled "The 2023 Lutheran Religious Life Survey." According to the description, the purpose of the survey was to collect information on the attitudes, characteristics, and views of LCMS members. The section "Perceived Congregational Growth" gives some astounding insights.

According to the survey, about half of the approximately 2,000 LCMS members surveyed think that their congregations are staying about the same in terms of growth. Over 30% of LCMS members believe that their congregations are growing. Just under 20% of LCMS members think that their congregations are shrinking (Stone, 2024).

The reality is quite different. Over 70% of LCMS congregations are shrinking, approximately 20% are holding their own, and fewer than 10% are growing (Stone, 2024).

This should be obvious to anyone who has not been living in a cave for the past 40 years. Reports concerning our demographic crisis have even been discussed in convention in 2016.

The fact of the matter is that we have stopped having babies. That may not be the only problem we have where membership is concerned, but it certainly is a significant one. Getting married, starting a family, and having children is the surest way to grow. The other side of that coin is, if our members do not have families, if they do not procreate above the replacement rate, then we will shrink. During the last several generations, the LCMS has imbibed many progressive philosophies from our pagan culture here in the United States. The most destructive one, after the introduction of Higher Criticism and Gospel Reductionism, are the effects of the sexual revolution. We at least attempted to fight against the higher critics hijacking our seminaries. We did not do nearly as well resisting the sexual revolution.

We can see the trends if we look at some other statistics. According to reports published by the LCMS School Ministry between the school years 2014-2015 and 2021-2022, the number of children baptized in Synod increased by a moderate 2.6%.[1] That sounds OK until we look closer. In 2014-2015, 1,756 children were baptized. The number peaks in 2016-2017 at 2,486. From that point onwards, however, the trend is downward, to 1,794 in 2021-2022, the latest available statistics.

Instead of sending the children we did have to Lutheran schools, we sent them to progressive government schools. We thought that having extra-curricular activities in which they could participate was more essential to their formation as a person than keeping Christ at the center of their education. But it turns out that weekly Sunday school and catechism class just is not enough to combat the onslaught of the godless Leftist culture which is offered to them at every opportunity.

Over the past eight years, the number of LCMS schools has declined by approximately 12%.[2] In 2014 there were 2,111 LCMS schools. In the 2021-22 school year there were 1,855 schools. Because of inconsistency in the number of schools reporting statistics each year, the student enrollment data is less straightforward. Overall, the trend was downward from 2015. In 2015, the reported enrollment for LCMS schools was 191,340 with 81% of congregations/schools reporting. By 2021, that number was 162,074 with only 73% of congregations/schools reporting. It is likely that, had the number of congregations that reported statistics for the 2021-22 school year been similar to the 2015-16 school year (approximately 19% non-reporting rate) the decline would be less severe. It would, however, likely still be a decline.

At the government school, they were given a feeling of belonging and purpose. They are, after all, kept there, on average, around eight hours a day, five days a week. They were taught a secular anti-catechism that is a mix of moral relativism, Marxism, sexual perversion, and radical environmentalism. They were taught to worship the planet, to worship the culture, to worship their feelings, to worship themselves. They were taught what to think, to conform, and that such conformity was really tolerance. All the while, we parents were in denial. We told ourselves that stuff might be happening in the big cities or on the coasts. But it is not happening in my hidden little Mayberry, USA.

But it is. It happens anywhere a teacher who was trained at a secular Leftist university is teaching children. They were all trained in progressivism.

And we were surprised that, when our kids returned from college, they no longer confessed Christ and Him crucified as the atonement for the sin of the world and claimed to be the opposite sex. But we should not be surprised when, to paraphrase Voddie Baucham, our kids return to us Romans, after we have sent them to Caesar for their education.

Knowing us, we will grab onto whatever the hottest trend was 20 years ago among American Evangelicals to try and grow our congregations. I’ve seen us do it. We will probably also continue to blame traditional liturgical practices, chanting, vestments, "dead orthodoxy," and not being "loving" (otherwise known as being doctrinally uncompromising). All the while, we will continue to ignore the fact that the Marxist-Leftist-racist-environmentalist religion has also infiltrated our Synod, particularly our Concordia university system, and dismiss those who try to warn about this danger as "mean."

Ironically, the so-called conservative, confessional, and traditional congregations are among the ones actually showing growth (Stone, 2024).

Don't get me wrong: I would bet that the LCMS is less far gone than most of American Christianity. We can probably attribute that to three things many in our Synod also dislike: our theological foundation, which is justification by faith in Christ alone, our high view of the Holy Scriptures as established and protected in the Book of Concord and by theologians such as Walther and Pieper, and our tendency to isolate ourselves from the broader culture because of our "German-ness."

It's just too bad we also have some kind of theological/cultural/academic inferiority complex to go along with all those things.

Since the early to mid-20th Century, our theologians and professors have wanted to be seen in a more favorable light by mainstream American academia. We wanted our schools, universities, and seminaries to be taken seriously and our professors to be accepted as serious scholars. We did not want to be seen as crazy immigrant fundamentalists who ran some backward Bible colleges. And, as we shed the German language and cultural customs, we looked less and less like outsiders. The more we engaged in academic debate, the more the ideas of mainline American academia and Protestantism began to gain traction in the Synod.

Rev. Dr. Scott Murray describes this situation well in his book, "Law, Life, and the Living God: The Third Use of the Law in Modern American Lutheranism."

Murray explains that the LCMS was seen as old-fashioned by the Lutheran theologians and academics in Germany. They derisively referred to the LCMS repristinators of theology from the age of Lutheran Orthodoxy. When LCMS theologians met with them in the late 1940s, they were surprised that the Germans had little regard for the Book of Concord, except for the Augsburg Confession. They particularly dismissed the Formula of Concord, which they saw as Melanchthonian and a corruption of Luther's theology.

The Luther Renaissance influenced theologians in Germany to focus on Luther and his writings rather than on the Book of Concord. Consequently, the status of the theologians and writings from the age of Lutheran Orthodoxy was diminished. As Murray points out, the problem with this is how do we know which Luther is the real Luther. As is well-known and documented, early Luther was a much different theologian than older Luther. He developed into a Lutheran out of Augustinianism over time. There is a danger that writings from Luther's various periods could be used to support views held by modern theologians but that Luther had grown out of.

The LCMS participated in ecumenical meetings in Germany in 1947-48. This was the LCMS theologians' first significant contact with German Lutherans, who had been heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and Existentialism. Murray says that the LCMS theologians were particularly enamored with Werner Elert. While the LCMS would continue to claim their orthodoxy and so-called repristination theology following the meetings, they did bring back certain existential Lutheran influences. Among those influences, writes Murray, was a distaste for the Third Use of the Law. But that wasn't the only thing.

Existentialism in Lutheranism comes from Soren Kierkegaard. To the existentialist Lutheran, faith is an existential communication between God and man, where man encounters God. Faith is more than just knowing the right doctrines and how to express them using the correct formulas of jargon (Murray, 2002). To them, Murray explains, faith is a subjective experience for each person.

Pieper and Walther were the prime examples of LCMS repristination to the German Lutherans. This was, Murray explains, because they primarily cited sources from the age of Orthodoxy, chief among those sources being the Book of Concord, rather than adding their own insights. Pieper and Walther held the Formula of Concord in high regard. At the Bad Boll meetings in 1947-48, the German Lutherans criticized Pieper and Walter, and accused them of holding Biblical inerrancy as more important than the Doctrine of Justification (Murray, 2002). Here, we see the beginnings of what would develop into Gospel Reductionism in the Missouri Synod in the coming decades.

By 1960, LCMS theologians were criticizing the "dead orthodoxy" of Pieper and Walther. They were moving toward a theology that was "personal and dynamic" (Murray, 2002). This movement, influenced by existentialist thought, leads to a weakening of objective truth. In existentialist theology, only subjective experience is of value. Such thinking, suggests Murray, would eventually lead to abandoning the Third use of the Law (Murray, 2002). It would also develop into Gospel Reductionism.

Gospel Reductionism is a term coined by John Warwick Montgomery in 1966 to describe how theologians in the LCMS were using only "Christ and the Gospel" as the rule for determining doctrine rather than the whole council of the divinely inspired and inerrant Word of God as we have it in the Bible (Harmelink, 2024). These professors viewed the Bible through the lens of Higher Criticism. They believed that the Bible, rather than being the Word of God, merely contained the Word of God. Our job was to sort out which bits were God's word and which were not. They reduced everything down to the Gospel. Doctrines that did not impact the Gospel did not need to be kept.

Harmelink explains that Gospel Reductionism abandons divine inspiration, inerrancy, and the authority of Holy Scripture. Instead, doctrine is subject to the Gospel only. This might sound okay on the surface. In reality, it is a way to grant permission not to believe in difficult or troublesome teachings.

Gospel Reductionism makes man the judge of Holy Scripture when it should be the other way around. The Bible is not subject to our reason (the magisterial use of reason); instead, our reason should be subject to the Word of God (the ministerial use of reason).

Gospel Reductionism uses "Christ and the Gospel" to do away with other teachings the Gospel Reductionists see as problematic while keeping the Gospel, or so they claim. Without a divinely inspired and inerrant Word of God as a foundation, as Harmelink says, it is impossible to hold on to the Gospel. The Word of God delivers Christ and the Gospel to us.

Thankfully, with the Walkout of the faculty majority who taught these things from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis 50 years ago this past February and the firm line taken by the faithful and confessional leadership of Synod at the time, Lutheran Orthodoxy decisively won the Battle for the Bible.

But we must realize that, though we may have won the battle, the war is far from over. It will continue as long as Jesus tarries and we live in this fallen creation.

What must we do to stop the theology of the world from regaining a foothold and regaining ground? I do not have the answer. I can tell you what we absolutely must not do, though: drop our Bible and Books of Concord so we can embrace this world's philosophies. The instant we forsake the preaching of Law and Gospel, and the authority of Scripture, we are finished as a church body. We will no longer be part of Christ's body; we will have fallen from grace.

We must realize that this stance might mean some uncomfortable times for the LCMS. We might have to shrink the scope of what our Synod does. We might have to endure some ridicule from the culture at large. We might have to think about our priorities in terms of funding, in terms of where mission work is done, what it looks like, and how we train our pastors. Our institutions may need to get smaller. Maybe our universities are not accredited through secular institutions, and they focus on church work. Maybe we spend more effort encouraging our families to choose the one thing needful and send their children to faithful Lutheran schools instead of the government schools, so that they may grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Maybe we should start by encouraging Lutherans to get married and be open to having the number of children that the Lord will bless them with; to be fruitful, and multiply; to fill the earth and subdue it.

Yes, embracing these things may mean rejection and persecution by the world. But it will mean that, if those children we have and raise in the church persevere in the faith, they will receive a crown of life when Christ comes again.

And He is coming soon. ###

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Works Cited

Harmelink, D. (2024, February 19). It’s All About the Gospel . . . Isn’t It? The Lutheran Witness. Retrieved May 26, 2024, from https://witness.lcms.org/2024/the-walkout/

Murray, S. R. (2002). Law, Life, and the Living God [Kindle]. Concordia Publishing House. http://books.google.ie/books?id=L3XuNAAACAAJ&dq=Law,+Life,+and+the+Living+God&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api

Schmidt, R. (Director). (n.d.). Lutheran School Statistics. In LCMS School Ministry. Retrieved May 26, 2024, from https://www.lcms.org/school-ministry

Stone, L. (n.d.). Those Who Are Being Saved: Report on the Results of the 2023 Lutheran Religious Life Survey. https://www.lutheranlifesurvey.church/. Retrieved May 26, 2024, from https://www.lutheranlifesurvey.church/

Notes on "Why I Don't Get Involved in the Creation Debate"

    I believe in a literal six 24-hour day creation. I think the creation account given in Genesis is to be read plainly and understood as presented.

    Generally speaking, the old Synodical Conference Lutherans believed in the literal six 24-hour days of creation.

    According to Rev. Jordan Cooper, other American Confessional Lutherans who were not affiliated with the Synodical Conference did not necessarily hold this view. (Cooper, 2018) These were not the followers of Schmucker, or other unorthodox Lutherans in America. He describes them as Confessional Lutherans who believed in the inerrancy of Scripture. They believed that Moses wrote the Torah. They believed that Jesus was a real person, that He was God incarnate, that He was really crucified to death, and that He truly, bodily rose from the dead. These were men like Charles Porterfield Krauth and Henry Jacobs. (Cooper, 2018)

    To generalize, the reason these non-Synodical Conference Lutherans held to a more figurative view of creation had to do with how they understood the genre of Genesis. Today the debate over a six-literal-days creationism in Lutheranism is framed more between confessional versus liberal. Rev. Dr. Cooper suggests this probably has to do with the fact that confessional Lutheranism in America today is defined and shaped by the old Synodical Conference, and the synods of which it was comprised, most notably the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. (Cooper, 2018)

    Like Dr. Cooper, I also don't like to get involved in this debate because I just can't wrap my brain around it. Maybe this is because I am a life-long member of the LCMS and have been thoroughly indoctrinated into that way of thinking.

     If, however, you are willing to believe in an omnipotent God who can create the universe ex nihilo by speaking it into existence, why would you think that He couldn't do so in the time period of six literal 24 hour days? A plain reading of the text would suggest this. We aren't dealing with a poetic or an apocalyptic writing fraught with symbols to be interpreted.

     The other choice is that God created the world in a different way than He recorded through Moses in Genesis, but He didn't want to tell us for...reasons.

     This seems like the same kind of argument the Jehovah's Witnesses make for their interpretation of Jesus' resurrection. They say that Jesus' body did not rise from the dead. His resurrection was spiritual, they say. He could vanish and walk though closed doors. He could materialize and de-materialize at will, not unlike the angels, manifesting a body when they needed one. When you point out His post-resurrection appearances, they tell you that Jesus made it look like it was His body so that the disciples would believe.

     Your word is truth, Lord. I believe this is another instance of men who believe the supernatural working of God in this world to be an impossibility trying to rationalize Scripture. Your word is truth, Lord. With man this is impossible. With God, all things are possible. Even creating the world out of nothing by speaking it into existence over the course of six literal 24-hour days. Even raising the dead.

    This is, in fact, the entire hope of the Christian. For if Christ is not raised, we are still in our sins, and our faith is in vain. We are to be pitied more than all other men.

    And at the heart of the denial of the six-day creation is the denial of God's word. It is us giving in to the devil's one and only question, the question he asked Eve in the garden. The question he continues to whisper into our ears today: Did God really say...?

    If he can get us to deny what God really said, he can get us to separate ourselves from God. And, while I will not say it is impossible to believe in Christ as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world while believing the creation account of Genesis to be figurative, I would caution that a little leaven leavens the whole lump. The end of that road of denying the miracles of God and subordinating God's word to man's rationality is loss of faith. It will ultimately lead to the denial of Christ's propitiatory death for the sins of the world, and His bodily resurrection from the dead. ###

References

Cooper, Jordan B. 2018. "Why I don't Get Involved in the Creation Debate." October 17, 2018. YouTube. 

https://youtu.be/SoCnMoARAYU.

The Great Apostasy

Friday after Trinity 13

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron, forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be refused if it is received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer (1 Timothy 4:1-5).

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) recently held their convention. The convention was broadcast on the internet and, for the orthodox Christian who is unfamiliar with the liberal (and very political) Christianity of main-line Protestantism, the proceedings were quite shocking. Pastors preaching sermons, disguised as virtue-signaling prayers, on how white people can atone for America’s original sin of racism, which is inextricably imbedded in the machinery of both church and state. Groups of people on stage confessing their racial sins to people of color, and not receiving an absolution, but rather a prescription for how to make things right; a kind of modern day, social justice penance. And, in the most shocking moments, a flat-out denial of Jesus Christ. When a layman stood up to speak to a resolution asserting the validity of all religions, pointing out that Christ Himself denies this when He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me,” (John 14:6), he was derided and ridiculed openly on the convention floor by the clergy. The pastors scrambled to apologize to their “inter-faith guests” for the ignorant layman’s shocking, rude, and culturally insensitive comments.

Paul writes to Timothy, explaining that in the latter days, some people will depart from the faith. Paul seems to be dealing with the legalism of keeping the Old Testament Law, and the man-made traditions of the elders, that he writes about in his other epistles. Departure from sound doctrine, however, is certainly not limited to just these types of things. If you ever needed any evidence that we are living in the latter days, certainly such shameful goings-on should suffice. People dressed as pastors, shepherds of congregations charged with feeding their flocks with God’s Word and administering to them His Sacraments, denying Christ before all the world. Even the Pharisees were better than this. At least they honored God with their lips, though their hearts were far from Him. 

No, these are false ministers of a false Christ; one who is concerned with calling members of the oppressor classes to repentance for their sins of racism, sexism, and class exploitation. These ministers are not concerned with the actual Gospel message of Christ crucified as the ransom for mankind’s sin, and raised to life again on the third day for man’s justification. They are interested only in fixing the injustices of this present world; they are interested only in assigning guilt to people for the crimes of their ancestors collectively, to achieve social justice. They deal only with people as groups, and not as individuals. They never see a man as someone who is a sinner, in need of Christ’s forgiveness. He is only a member of a class, a race, or a gender. If one happens to be a part of an oppressor group, the only forgiveness he can hope for is what he can earn through doing the penance that the oppressed prescribe, and then only if he is deemed worthy enough will he be absolved.

This is called Liberation Theology. It is politics masquerading as religion. It has infected all of the so-called main-line Protestant denominations, along with the higher critical method of Biblical interpretation. It is what happens when you reject the truth of the Bible. St. Paul explains:

But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty (1 Corinthians 15:13-14).

Higher criticism is a man-centered approach to Biblical interpretation. This approach assumes that to understand the Bible, we must understand the mind of the authors, and their perceptions of God, at the time they wrote what they wrote. It is inherently materialistic; in the higher critical method of Biblical interpretation there is no room for miracles. Higher critics claim to believe the Bible, but they cannot accept anything supernatural. That means no six-day creation; no parting of the Red Sea; no Jonah receiving a prophetic word from the Lord and being swallowed, and vomited out alive again, by a giant fish. It means, in fact, no prophetic words from the Lord at all. If nothing supernatural happens then all of the prophecies recorded in the Bible aren’t really prophecies. All of the things that the prophets wrote are just clever pieces of literature, written hundreds of years after the events that they claim to foretell. It means no fall into sin, no promise of a savior, and no Christ, God in human flesh. Jesus was simply a man, if he even existed, a wise and good moral teacher who cared about equality and justice, and taught men to love their neighbors. That means no atonement for sins, and no resurrection from the dead. The result of all this is indeed empty preaching and an empty faith:

For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable (1 Corinthians 15:17-19).

What happens to a congregation, or an entire denomination, in the case of the ELCA, that gives up the guts of the faith? Well, just like when a person is eviscerated, they die. But, those people have to put their hope in something. Since there is no supernatural, no hope in a world to come, no hope in a Jesus in whom dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily, who died as the atonement for sin, who has promised to return in judgment and bring ultimate justice to mankind, they must focus on themselves, and on the here-and-now. All of a sudden, the purpose of the church isn’t to preach Christ crucified for the forgiveness of sins, but to fight for justice in this world. Man’s problem is no longer being dead in trespasses and sins, but rather racism, political oppression, and crimes against the environment.

What’s wrong with justice? Nothing. God’s Word calls us to be just; we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. If, however, you reject what God says about the human condition, you will never understand why that is impossible, in this fallen creation, to achieve that goal. Moreover, achieving social justice, whether you believe the idea is right or wrong, does nothing to rescue us from sin and death.

We are fallen, sinful creatures living in a fallen, sinful world. We are, by nature, sinful and unclean. It is why Jesus tells us, in the Sermon on the Mount, to be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. He’s showing us that we can’t do it. He is using the Law to show us our sin, to show us that we are lost, and that we need a savior from outside of ourselves. In the absence of the real Jesus, churches turn to Counterfeit Jesus. In America, that is oftentimes Comrade Jesus. Comrade Jesus teaches us that our real problems are systemic racism, sexism, and class oppression. Comrade Jesus teaches us to overcome these sins through socialism, communism, environmentalism, and whatever other political “ism” there is that gives man a work to do to atone for their sin. Not their real sin, mind you, but the things that those “isms” call sin; the things they use to control men, and keep them from fixing their eyes on the real Jesus, the author and perfecter of the real faith.

What is the remedy? In short, it is to repent, and believe the Gospel. That is the fix for those caught in the heresy of Higher Criticism and Liberation Theology. Christ’s blood is powerful enough to wash away the stain of our sin, no matter what it is. But we who are firmly ensconced in supposedly orthodox church bodies, like the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, are not immune from what has happened in the ELCA. If we go chasing after fads, and abandon Jesus so that we can try to make friends with the world to keep parishioners in our pews, the same thing will happen with the LCMS. If we bow to the pressure to be relevant to the culture, to be “woke”, to be what the world falsely calls tolerant and loving, if we abandon sound doctrine, we will end up on a stage competing with each other in displays of heresy, virtue-signaling how woke we are on whatever issue the culture is up-in-arms about that week. And we will be outside of God’s Kingdom along with the other social justice warriors who have replaced Christ with the idol of politics. God forbid! Lord, have mercy!