"In order to have canon law, you have to have a church. The LCMS is congregational in structure and congregationalist in practice. Since congregation is the only church there is, there can be no canon law.
When the Confessions say "We do... keep... observe..." they are not merely descriptive. They had no conception of something other than this. It was not even possible much less permissible. Our current circumstances in Missouri and wider Lutheranism present perspectives which were foreign and alien to the framers of the Confessions."
--Pr. Larry Peters, in a combox on Weedon's blog
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5 comments:
I saw that!
There was a guy a while back who wrote a thesis entitled "There is no Lutheran Church." You might be familiar with it? ;)
Honestly, what a frightening conclusion. I was there once, too. Fortunately by the grace of God that led me to Holy Orthodoxy.
Blessed Theophany to you, Father Gregory!
Confusion reigns...
The reality is: "every man does according to his own heart."
Or,
Every pastor/congregation ends up being a "law" unto itself.
Holy Tradition is jettisoned.
I truly saw the example of that jettisoning yesterday morn during Orthos, Divine Liturgy, and the Blessing of the waters: Lutherans know nothing of the great prayers in the latter!
Kyrie eleison!
"Every pastor/congregation ends up being a "law" unto itself."
We should be wary of being too triumphalistic on this score. While the range and topics of idiosyncrasy may be narrower in Orthodoxy, there are still many examples of given jurisdictions, bishops and priests acting as if they were their own law unto themselves. My bishop is tackling that issue within his diocese, for instance, and its easy to see the drift in 'common' practice when visiting other parishes and jurisdictions (even taking into account legitimately 'ancient, local practice').
This is actually a significant problem in American Orthodoxy, and one hears rumblings of the same from the 'diaspora' but also from the autocephalous churches themselves, e.g., Serbia, Greece, even Russia here and there.
I certainly wasn't being triumphalistic ... I came from that Reformation background.
Indeed, there are struggles in Orthodoxy where we are indeed sinners struggling with the passions.
But deep within is Holy Tradition, the Divine Liturgy, etc. where there is a corrective. When that tradition is no longer in any way meaningfully present, and in fact, NOT PRESENT, the depostir of Truth is gone and the wandering goes further and further ...
As Orthodox, we must confess our own struggles because Satan loves to have each of us justify ourselves and our own sin.
And so we pray without ceasing,
"Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on ME the sinner."
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