The Unity of the Lutheran Church

Neither the common agreement of the authors of the Formula of Concord, which the signatories approved, nor the determination that the church needed a “summary formula and pattern, unanimously approved” can be interpreted in this sense, as if the confession were a party platform or an association’s rule, arising from the will of individuals who set a norm for themselves. Already the fact that “we believe, teach, and confess” contradicts such a view; the phase with which the doctrinal decisions of the Formula of Concord begin corresponds to the great “we” which is the speaking subject in all great confessions of the church, from the pisteuomen [“We believe…] of the Nicene Creed to Luther’s hymnic form of the Credo: “we all believe in one God” and to the ecclesiae magno consensu apud nos docent [“The churches, with great unanimity, teach with us…”] of the Augsburg Confession. The Lutheran confession, understood in this sense, belongs indeed to the essence of the Lutheran church. It alone makes it into that which it is. Our church is essentially a confessional church in a sense in which neither the Catholic nor the Reformed churches are—because all these churches have, in addition to their confession, something else, which characterizes them in their uniqueness and holds them together: their constitution, their liturgy, their discipline, or whatever else. The Lutheran Church does not have all that. It is part of its understanding of the divine Word, of the distinction between Law and Gospel, that it finds no laws in the New Testament about church constitution, church discipline, and liturgy. It can live with presbyteral, episcopal, or congregational forms of constitution. Its liturgical possibilities reach from Swedish high-churchliness to the liturgy-lessness of Württemberg. It has only its confession. If Gospel and sacrament are the notae ecclesiae [the marks of the church], by which we recognize the presence of the church of Christ, then the notae ecclesiae Lutheranae, the trait by which we recognize whether a church is Lutheran or not, is the Lutheran confession. Inasmuch as we determine this, we do not need, after all that has been said, to protect ourselves primarily from the misunderstanding, that we would place the notae of the invisible church of God on the same level with the traits of earthly historical ecclesiologies. We believe the church of God to be in, with, and under the earthly ecclesiologies, because we see the Gospel and the sacraments there, and insofar as we see the Gospel and the sacraments there. The confession, by which we recognize the Lutheran church, is for us nothing else than the “Yes!” to this Gospel and to these sacraments.

Hermann Sasse, Letters to Lutheran Pastors no. 25.