Suffocating Freedom

I don't know when it happened. Maybe not so quickly. But it has happened. The freedom we have in the gospel of Jesus is suffocating once again. Perhaps it's the human, less truthful side of James 2:10 where James writes, "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all." Divine leading and application of this passage leads to grace, forgiveness, peace, contentment and finally, freedom. But remove the Spirit, apply it to things human and the principle remains while love is lost. Let me explain.

The LC-MS at one time in its history, confounded not only the world but ecclesiaologists as well. What kind of church body were we? Were we conservative? Certainly. We held (and hold) the historic creeds as ours. Scripture is inerrant and infallible. Jesus is the only source of hope for salvation. Creation took place, relative to the current secular models, only a handful of thousands of years ago. All of that was "conservative." It is still true today.

But the piece that confounds is this. How does one explain the creative missiology of the LC-MS of the 30's, 40's, and 50's? While on the one hand we were warning the culture of the dangers of certain foundational presuppositions as Theadore Graebner did in his book, "God and the Cosmos" and as Alfred Rehwinkel did in his book, "The Flood," on the other hand we were exploring new, different, and creative ways in which the world could learn of Christ. Worship agendas were offered in 1922 by the church as descriptive possibilities and received as such, rather than as prescriptive mandates, the use of which is required to be Lutheran.

The explanation rests in the clarity of God's total, complete and unassailable grace in the context of Man's total and complete inability to offer to God anything of his own salutary righteousness. The consequence of the death and resurrection of Jesus is the removal of condemnation. With that there is the removal of fear and the offer of freedom. In the words of St. Paul, "For freedom Christ set us free, therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery." (Galatians 5:1)

The Galatians once knew the Gospel and then set it aside for the approval of people who had come within their fellowship. With that compromise, they lost their freedom. It was being smothered by people who were saying, "If you really want to be Christian, then you will do this and that and the other thing." Paul did not write a nice letter of commendation to them. Rather he came close to condemnation as the church was about to add works to Christ.

That same warning comes to us today. What will you do with the freedom you have? Apart from the Holy Spirit, our life in the freedom of the Gospel confuses the world. (How can anyone understand something naturally when it is supernaturally established i.e.. faith in Christ?) Remove our freedom in Christ and we look like everyone else apart from Christ. Do you really want the world to figure us out?