“Protestant” is not a terribly useful word. In practice all it really seems to mean is that a person wants to say he is a Christian but not Roman Catholic. The word suffers, because, by that definition, it takes in too much. Any designation that reasonably can be applied to a Hard Shell Baptist, a High Church Anglican, a Calvinist Puritan, a Revivalist Methodist, a Holy Rolling Pentecostal, and a member of any non-denominational congregation, cannot mean much! Nevertheless, there might be some very general, and yet still very important, theological commonalities among all these groups. Lutherans emphasize three things that Protestants generally do not: 1) Sacramental Realism, 2) That Faith Cannot Be Based on Faith, and 3) That the Holy Spirit Works through Physical Means.
Physical, Objective Means of Grace
Like Roman Catholics, Lutherans are “sacramental realists”. We believe and teach that the Holy Spirit deals with human beings through certain physical means or instruments that He has ordained. Namely, the Holy Spirit uses 1) human words and language not only to communicate the message of the Gospel, but also, and especially, to deliver to the hearer what the words say or promise; 2) water to cleanse and regenerate the sinner and graft him or her into the Church; and 3) the real presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist to feed and sustain the faith of His people. Lutherans view these physical things not only as symbols but as signs of what the Holy Spirit is actually doing–doing in the speaking of the words or the performance of the ceremony. To put this another way, the Word and the Sacraments have an objective reality and power independent of our faith. That is “Sacramental Realism”.
Protestants, to a greater or lesser extent, tend to see these physical things, especially the ceremonies called Sacraments, not as signs of what Christ is actually doing through them (whether we believe it or not), but as symbols of the kinds of things Christ does for believers, not through the symbols themselves, but by the invisible working of the Holy Spirit at other times and places. A symbol has no objective power or reality. Hopefully it points to something else that does, but the symbol itself is nothing. For example, a cross is meant to symbolize Jesus’ atoning death and to direct our thoughts to it. That symbol can be very powerful and can stir a person’s faith just to look at it. But if a person doesn’t know what the cross is meant to symbolize, then it would be meaningless to them, and powerless to do anything. That’s because symbols work subjectively. They depend entirely on the knowledge, understanding and belief of those who encounter them to communicate anything at all. Sacraments are not like that. They have an objective reality and power independent of our faith and understanding.
For this reason, Protestants commonly prefer the designation “ordinances” over “Sacraments”, because while they agree these ceremonies are indeed established and commanded by God, they don’t want to give the impression that these acts have some special power connected to them. Thus, for most Protestants, Baptism itself does not save, but is only a picture or symbol of the conversion of the person being baptized, a conversion that presumably has already happened. Similarly, the Eucharist is not actually Christ bodily present among his people and giving Himself to them, but rather a symbol of our having been reconciled to Him and to one another through his atoning death.
How Faith Works
This leads to another very important distinction between Lutherans and most Protestants, and it relates to how faith works. For the Lutheran, the objective reality of the Word and Sacraments means our faith is grounded in something real, something outside of ourselves, something that is true even if we don’t believe it. Without this sacramental realism, though, faith often ends up grounding itself in faith. What do I mean? Protestants like to say, “I am saved because I believe.” But consider the logic: “I know I am saved if I have faith. And how do I know I have faith? Because I can tell I believe.” This person is essentially saying, “I believe that I believe, therefore I know I am saved. That’s faith basing itself on faith. That’s shaky ground! What if a person isn’t sure if he or she believes? On the other hand, here is the logic of sacramental realism: “I am not saved because I believe. Rather, I believe that I am saved. And why do I believe that? Because Christ told me so when I was baptized, and He does not lie.” In other words, I don’t have to know I have faith in Jesus. I just have to believe what Jesus tells me. My feeling of having faith may go up and down, but Jesus doesn’t lie.
Let’s take another example. In Baptism Christ, through the Holy Spirit, actually offers salvation to the one being baptized, whether the one being baptized believes in Christ or not. Now, only those who receive Christ’s offer of salvation by faith are actually saved, but the baptism was real and valid (it was the work of Christ Himself) and the offer was genuine (He really was calling the person to be saved) no matter whether the person believed it or not. To put this another way, Baptism doesn’t become the call of Christ to be saved because we believe it to be so. Rather, we should believe it to be the call of Christ because it is. The physical things God uses to deal with us don’t depend on our faith to make them real or powerful. They are what they are-real and powerful-because Christ has ordained them to be so. They don’t depend on our faith; our faith depends on them.
How the Holy Spirit Works
A third distinction between Lutherans and most Protestants relates to how the Holy Spirit works among us. Lutherans teach that where the Word of God is (or the Sacraments, which are merely enacted words of God), there is the Holy Spirit empowering them and doing what they say. Thus, Baptism is powerful because it is empowered by the Holy Spirit. Likewise, the preached or inscripturated Word is powerful because those words are also empowered by the Holy Spirit. There is no such thing as a “Word of God” that is not empowered by, and a conveyer of, the Holy Spirit. So, through the Word and Sacraments Christians “see” the Holy Spirit at work, and “hear” the very Voice of God.
Protestantism, on the other hand, tends to see the Holy Spirit working not visibly, through physical things, but freely and invisibly. “Detecting” the Spirit’s presence, then, is not about perceiving the Word and Sacraments, but about feeling the Spirit’s presence, or observing evidence that the Holy Spirit is or has been at work–in the fact that a person has been converted, for example, or in the manifestation of charismatic gifts. In Protestantism, the chief thing about the Word of God is that it is a true message from God, reliably telling us what God wants and how we are to be saved, and the chief thing about Baptism or the Eucharist is that it teaches truly what the Holy Spirit does among us, that is, how He gives us new birth and brings us into fellowship with Christ and with one another.
Now, Lutherans certainly understand that the Holy Spirit is not limited by the Word and Sacraments, as though He cannot work in any other way than through them. What we are saying are these two things: 1) the Holy Spirit accomplishes His task of saving and sanctifying people only by means of the Word and Sacraments. And 2) except through the Word and Sacraments, the Holy Spirit does not work to save and sanctify us–though there are any number of other things He might be doing–and moreover, when He works invisibly like that we can never be sure what, if anything, He is doing.
The Place of the Catholic Heritage of Worship and Christian Piety
For a Baptist, one of the most striking, and foreign, aspects of Lutheranism is our worship and prayer life. It looks very Roman Catholic. And, in truth, they are very similar–although, Lutherans would say we are not trying to be Roman Catholic, just catholic. Lutherans and Roman Catholics are two catholic church bodies. As such, we each claim a common heritage from the ancient and medieval Church. So what does that mean?
Lutherans did not form a new church, and we had no intention of abandoning the Church’s rich heritage and starting over from scratch, merely because the Roman Church claimed it also. It’s our heritage too! Christ Himself established the only Church there has ever been fifteen hundred years before Martin Luther. Lutherans were not revolutionaries, set on overthrowing the Church, but reformers, desiring to bring the Church back to its Christ-centered, Biblical foundation. The Church needed reforming, but we Lutherans did not wish to “throw out the baby with the bathwater”. We fixed what needed fixing, and largely left the rest alone.
So why do we still retain so much of the medieval catholic Church’s practices? Three reasons, really:
- The vast bulk of the Church’s medieval heritage, it’s worship and prayer practices, its creeds and theology, is completely Biblical, and a great treasure. They are not only beautiful, but they beautifully and powerfully teach the mysteries of the faith.
- The prayer and worship practices of the medieval church, much of which had come down to it from the ancient Church, has stood the test of time. By the time of Martin Luther, Christians had been worshipping and praying in these catholic ways for a thousand years or more. Not only that, but five hundred more years have passed since then, and these catholic practices still prove their enduring worth.
- Catholic prayer and worship practices strengthen and enhance the external unity of the Church. Lutherans are not schismatic. We do not do things differently than other Christians just to be different. Quite the contrary, we try to do things as much like other Christians–Christians in the past and Christians around the world–as we can. And here is a fact: The vast majority of the world’s Christians, throughout the Church’s two thousand year history, and still today, worship and pray in a catholic way.