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 misinterpret the teaching, 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 that distinction was different from the language used by Scripture. And my friend only knew the language of Scripture, not the 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 culture especially, God’s Word is often the only common ground left for a shared standard of terminology among Christians.
Though this writing may sound strange to some Lutheran ears due to the deviation from our common terminology, I asked Lutheran pastor Will Weedon to review it. He kindly did so and responded as follows (with permission to share):
“Wow. Nothing to add but my amen to your fine work here, Bryan. Enjoyed the reading.”
(You can download the full pdf here,)