The Sad Case of Pr. Robert Stuenkel Revisited

My colleague in the pastoral ministry, Pr. Robert Stuenkel, is facing expulsion from the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod because he has communed with his wife at her parish, a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. For the details of Bob's situation, see Pr. Arnie Voigt's article, "Restoring the Brother," which was originally published in the July issue of Forum Letter and was reprinted by permission of the publisher on my blog (July 18, 2011).

One of the issues in Bob's case involves the interpretation of section 2 of Article VI ("Conditions of Membership") in the LCMS Constitution. That section states that one of the conditions for membership is "renunciation of unionism and syncretism of every description, such as serving congregations of mixed confession, as such, by ministers of the church;" and "taking part in the services and sacramental rites of heterodox congregations or of congregations of mixed confession."

What does this mean? "Unionism" is a term unique to the Missouri Synod and is intimately connected with its pre-history and early history. It has never been carefully defined. Originally the term described the forced "union" of Lutheran and Reformed congregations by royal decree in nineteenth-century Prussia and by voluntary decision of German Protestants in the United States. In practice, the term has also been applied to situations where a member of the synod has expressed "church fellowship" with church groups that have not accepted the panoply of LCMS doctrinal resolutions. Only those who share completely every doctrinal resolution of the Missouri Synod meet the condition of church fellowship with her, that is, altar and pulpit fellowship. Not surprisingly, the charge of "unionism" has been frequently leveled against military and hospital chaplains, foreign missionaries, and campus pastors, but the synod has historically (at least until the last couple of decades) granted exceptions to the general rule in these situations. (Pr. Stuenkel is a retired campus pastor.)

At its best the synod has balanced the desire to have a common confession of faith and uniform practice that reflects that faith with the more important need to remain an evangelical, non-coercive fellowship whose true focus and heartbeat is the gospel of faith alone in Christ alone. At its worst, the synod has broadened the definition of unionism so much that some used to say that a Missouri Lutheran must not have a common table prayer with anyone else but another Missouri Lutheran. In the early twentieth century, a synodical missionary who prayed with some other Protestant missionaries on the way to India was disciplined and recalled. (Later the synod publicly apologized for such loveless legalism against this missionary.)  Too often synodical leaders have applied the narrowest letter of LCMS canon law in the harshest way. More recently, the synod has been unwilling to embrace a totally legalistic definition of "unionism" and has acknowledged that praying with other Christians, or even worshiping with them, is not necessarily "unionism." After all, there are many examples of LCMS forebears and others attending divine services in "heterodox" congregations who did not come under the accusation of "unionism." (Even that strict German-Lutheran confessionalist, Claus Harms, regularly snuck into the Dreifaltigkeitkirche to listen to the great Schleiermacher preach!)

Article VI's description of "unionism" is ambiguous but it seems to be oriented toward LCMS clergy who serve as a liturgist or celebrant in a congregation that does not confess the regula fidei, the rule of faith. It can't possibly refer to members who confess their sins, sing psalms and hymns, hear the Holy Scriptures, confess the ancient ecumenical creeds, hear the gospel in the sermon, and pray with other Christians in a divine service.

A little book that has had a negative impact on the understanding of "church fellowship" in the LCMS is Abendmahl und Kirchengemeinschaft in der alten Kirche hauptsaechlich des Ostens by Werner Elert. The book was translated by my teacher, Norman Nagel, as Eucharist and Church Fellowship in the First Four Centuries (St. Louis: CPH, 1966). I have great respect for Elert and his scholarship and this book is very informative, but how it has been used in both Germany and the United States has led Lutheran congregations away from true Koinonia (communion) and to a sectarian practice of church fellowship.

Elert's little book on patristic Eucharistic fellowship in the eastern churches needs to be understood for what it was, an initial descriptive study in his Dogmengeschichte (a multi-vol. history of dogma), a project he never finished. (A portion of his study of eastern Christology in the 4th-6th centuries was published posthumously.) So the volume is a historical study and not a normative, dogmatic treatise for the contemporary evan-Luth. church.

Even though eastern churches tied confessional orthodoxy (maximally understood) and even church polity to Eucharistic fellowship, Elert himself limited Eucharistic fellowship solely to the confession of the mandatory and essential content of the church's kerygma, i.e., to what is truly essential for the church's unity ("all the factors that sustain the church"), which, of course is summarized in the creeds and evangelical confessions--although these need to be re-examined again and again to [re]-discover what this "essential kerygmatic content" is for the present church. Elert never tired of stressing a minimalist interpretation of Article VII of the Augsburg Confession: the one, holy Christian church "is the assembly of all believers among whom the gospel is purely preached and the holy sacraments are administered according to the gospel."

Significantly, Elert placed his discussion of the Lord's Supper after "the person of the reconciler" and "the work of the reconciler" in the fifth part of his Glaubenslehre (his dogmatics), the part entitled "reconciliation." His reasons for doing so centered on the catholic-orthodox-evangelical claim that what one confesses of Christ has implications for what confesses of Christ's Supper and vice versa. (In other words, Luther's debate with Zwingli was a Christological debate, not merely or even centrally a debate about the Lord's Supper.)

(Baptism is addressed in part two of his sixth section, "the changed existence" [Der Existenzwandel], after his analysis of "the church" and before his analysis of "Encouragement [paraclesis] and justification." Elert held that "baptismal fellowship" is already a reality among most western and eastern Christians, since they acknowledge each other's Baptisms as valid. But interestingly, he does not treat the Lord's Supper under "the church.")

The final paragraphs in Elert's discussion of the Lord's Supper (trans. by Martin Bertram as The Lord's Supper Today [CPH, 1973], 46-47) are most helpful for correcting the notion that there must be complete theological agreement in all matters of scriptural doctrine before there can be church fellowship: "It is precisely in the situation of the local congregation that the Lord's Supper fulfills its function as synaxis [participation in Christ and Christ's body, the church] most meaningfully," a synaxis that also has "an eschatological character." This "synaxis" "depends on the Lord's own call--and since it achieves its reality through the food received in this meal--this synaxis is practiced to the extent that Christ's call is obeyed and this food is received... Here, as in the Eucharistic prayer of thanksgiving, God is being asked to grant the synaxis of His church. What this says, first of all, is that the synaxis in the Lord's Supper is not achieved by the mere assembling of Christians. Rather it is the work of Him who calls them together and makes of the many one body."

Pr. Stuenkel and his wife have been baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ. They publicly confess their sins and their need for Christ's forgiveness in the divine liturgy of their local congregations (LCMS and ELCA). They publicly confess the faith that is defined in the Apostles' and Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan creeds. They have been taught and they regularly confess the regula fidei that is summarized in Dr. Luther's Small Catechism. This regula fidei is identical in Pr. Stuenkel's LCMS congregation and in Mrs. Stuenkel's ELCA congregation, and this despite the theological differences that do in fact exist between these two church bodies. Pr. Stuenkel and his wife regularly hear the promise of Christ who calls them to HIS table to receive all that he has to give them, his body and blood for the forgiveness of their sins. In that promise they discern the body of Christ in their local congregations. In that promise, they hear that the Lord is calling to them and speaking to them: "Take and eat, this is given for you… Take and drink, this is shed for you…" In the synaxis of their local congregations, both LCMS and ELCA, Bob and his wife, Julie, join the faithful in proclaiming that "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again." They are in fact "confessing the Lord's death until he comes." 

The same regula fidei exists in both congregations. The same confession exists in both congregations. To somehow think that there is "an LCMS confession" and a different "ELCA confession" is to go against the divine word of faith that is confessed publicly in both congregations. When a member of the LCMS confesses the faith of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, he or she is not confessing Missouri Synod doctrinal resolutions or statements; he or she is confessing the faith of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, the regula fidei, that is, the doctrine of faith in Christ alone.

Is it not time that the LCMS stop putting itself in the position of rightly discerning for others the body of Christ? While the Synod has occasionally moved in this direction with other all-too-human convention resolutions, it has not proscribed reception of the Lord's Supper in ELCA congregations. The synod has called other church bodies names ("heterodox") and propped itself up as the true visible church of Christ on earth, but it cannot rightly put itself, human organization that it is, between the Lord's Supper and individual conscience.

Who among us LCMSers can state with absolute confidence that one has NOT rightly discerned the body of Christ when one eats and drinks the Lord's Supper in a congregation of the ELCA? How could the LCMS as a political institution ever make that kind of judgment for an individual without at the same time lording over
the individual consciences of others, frustrating the invitation and promise of Christ, and doing violence against his body?

For someone to rule/demand that another Christian (who is not under the restrictions of excommunication) must refrain from communing in such and such a congregation does violence against the body of Christ, does not preserve the communion of all who belong to Jesus Christ, and is an offense against the responsibility of communion that has its basis in the very nature of the Lord's Supper.

The invitation of Jesus that a pastor issues when he/she says the words of institution in Jesus' stead is for all of Jesus's disciples, and no bishop or district president or church body on its own may insert itself between this invitation and those who respond to it in responsible faith.