Thank God, there still are Lutheran Churches that do not join in this theology of the “as though, ” churches in which one is still aware of what is meant by the prayer which the Church of Jesus Christ offers daily for its preservation in the true doctrine and in the right use of the Sacraments... These churches—as a rule they are the smallest and poorest ones, to which the temptations of secularism have not yet come so near—have a special function to perform. They are the ones who, on the basis of their own spiritual experiences, have something to say to the larger bodies, namely that it is not the millions that make a church strong and give it power over the minds, but He alone who is present wherever two or three are gathered together in His name. They are the ones who must tell a World Lutheranism which is striving for unity that the uniting of churches is not a process of addition by which one brings together everything that with more or less justification claims the name of Lutheran, but a process of integration which lets it appear clearly just what a Lutheran Church can be. The arithmetic of God is different from that of men. The greatness of the Church of Jesus Christ does not depend upon the many zeros that make such an impression upon our human eye. - Hermann Sasse, On the Relation of the Universal Church and the Individual Congregation in the New Testament
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 15:03:55 +0000
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