So,
an Australian Lutheran Seminarian decide to be an Internet Troll, and recently
attacked a facebook group connected with my denomination, asking the question: “Why does the ELCA have Luther in their
name when he was a racist and sexist bigot?” From what I can gather from
his responses to people’s earnest answers to his question, he mainly wanted to
tell folk that his version of Lutheranism follows Luther warts and all, unlike
those sissies in the ELCA who ordain women and apologized for Luther’s
anti-Jewish writings.
Now, his question got me thinking about names. Of
course, Luther wanted Lutherans to be called “Evangelicals” but like so many
other groups (for example Methodists, Mormons, and Quakers), Lutherans didn’t
get to name ourselves. Instead, people hurled the term “Lutheran” at us as an insult,
and it stuck.
And I wonder how that name Lutheran, has shaped who we are
as a church?
A few counter-factuals:
What if we’d managed to have the name we wanted, Evangelical.
Evangelical comes from the Greek word for Good News. Would we have been more diligent
in telling people about God’s grace if we’d been known as Evangelicals? Would more
people have heard that God loved them even before they loved themselves, if we’d
had that name?
For that matter, what if we’d named ourselves after the
documents that best describe what we believe, the Confession of Augsburg or the
Book of Concord? What if we were Concordians or Augsburgers? Would
this decenter the personality of Luther and a corporate identity focused on
protesting and “Here I Stand” moments and re-center on celebrating moments of
unity?
Or, what would have happened if Luther’s Roman Catholic Order
became the descriptor of our faith, what if we identified as “Austere Augustinians”?
Would that point us back to the first four centuries of Christianity more than
our current identity? Would scripture AND tradition be a watch word for us
instead of “Scripture Alone”?
Finally, what if we’d called ourselves Catechismers?
That is, what if the commonality we clung to was Luther’s Small Catechism? How
might that empower lay folk to explore their many Christian callings? After
all, if you are identified with Luther, you probably need to be familiar with
his whole history and the giant corpus of his works. If you identify with the
confessions, it is fraught with background and a great deal of study is
required. But, if that little book, read by parents to children, is the center
of it all, wouldn’t more people think “Eh, sure, I can do that!”
