I was privileged to know a new Christian as he stepped into the faith and into the church of God. Sadly, as he was taught by more academically-minded individuals from my church body (the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod), there was a disconnect between the terms he heard them using and the terms he read in his Bible. There was miscommunication, because the teachers used academic terms with intended meanings that had been refined by centuries of church discourse but which were used differently from the plain uses of those terms that my friend saw in Scripture. This led him to misunderstand the teachers, and then to reject the whole church body and switch to another denomination entirely.
The issue was not whether what the teachers were saying was true and Scriptural. The issue was that the dialect they used to communicate what Lutherans call “the proper distinction of law and gospel” was technically different from the dialect used by Scripture. And my friend only knew the language of Scripture, not the academic dialect of the teachers.
The below is the result of my conversations with him. It is my attempt at confessing the faith for the new Christian in today’s audience: the substance that I inherit from Lutheran teachers, recast to avoid man-made academic terminology.
The goal is not to avoid being technical with language, but rather to just use language the way Scripture uses it, as faithfully as possible. In today’s mixed culture especially, God’s Word is often the only common ground left for a shared standard of terminology among Christians. This demands that we better appreciate and translate the terms that Scripture uses.
Though this writing may sound strange to some Lutheran ears due to the deviation from our common terminology, I believe it captures the core of Lutheran doctrine.
(You can download the full pdf here,)